Chasm City

by Alastair Reynolds

Genres: Space Opera; General Fiction; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Named one of the best novels of the year by both Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle, Alastair Reynolds's debut Revelation Space redefined the space opera. With Chasm City, Reynolds invites you to reenter the bizarre universe of his imagination as he redefines Hell...



The once-utopian Chasm City-a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet-has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted-from the people to the very buildings they inhabit-only the most wretched sort of existence remains. For security operative Tanner Mirabel, it is the landscape of nightmares through which he searches for a lowlife postmortal killer. But the stakes are raised when his search brings him face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget.

Release date: April 21, 2020

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 528

Sample

Darkness was falling as Dieterling and I arrived at the base of the bridge.

“There’s one thing you need to know about Red Hand Vasquez,” Dieterling said. “Don’t ever call him that to his face.”

“Why not?”

“Because it pisses him off.”

“And that’s a problem?” I brought our wheeler to near-halt, then parked it amongst a motley row of vehicles lining one side of the street. I dropped the stabilisers, the overheated turbine smelling like a hot gun barrel. “It’s not like we usually worry about the feelings of low-lives,” I said.

“No, but this time it might be best to err on the side of caution. Vasquez may not be the brightest star in the criminal firmament, but he’s got friends and a nice little line in extreme sadism. So be on your best behaviour.”

“I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Yeah—and do your best not to leave too much blood on the floor in the process, will you?”

We got out of the wheeler, both of us craning our necks to take in the bridge. I’d never seen it before today—this was my first time in the Demilitarised Zone, let alone Nueva Valparaiso—and it had looked absurdly large even when we’d been fifteen or twenty kilometres out of town. Swan had been sinking towards the horizon, bloated and red except for the hot glint near its heart, but there’d still been enough light to catch the bridge’s thread and occasionally pick out the tiny ascending and descending beads of elevators riding it to and from space. Even then I’d wondered if we were too late—if Reivich had already made it aboard one of the elevators—but Vasquez had assured us that the man we were hunting was still in town, simplifying his web of assets on Sky’s Edge and moving funds into long-term accounts.

Dieterling strolled round to the back of our wheeler—with its overlapping armour segments the mono-wheeled car looked like a rolled-up armadillo—and popped open a tiny luggage compartment.

“Shit. Almost forgot the coats, bro.”

“Actually, I was sort of hoping you would.”

He threw me one. “Put it on and stop complaining.”

I slipped on the coat, easing it over the layers of clothing I already wore. The coat hems skimmed the street’s puddles of muddy rainwater, but that was the way aristocrats liked to wear them, as if daring others to tread on their coat-tails. Dieterling shrugged on his own coat and began tapping through the patterning options embossed around the sleeve, frowning in distaste at each sartorial offering. “No. No… No. Christ no. No again. And this won’t do either.”

I reached over and thumbed one of the tabs. “There. You look stunning. Now shut up and pass me the gun.”

I’d already selected a shade of pearl for my own coat, a colour which I hoped would provide a low-contrast background for the gun. Dieterling retrieved the little weapon from a jacket pocket and offered it to me, just as if he were passing me a packet of cigarettes.

The gun was tiny and semi-translucent, a haze of tiny components visible beneath its smooth, lucite surfaces.

It was a clockwork gun. It was made completely out of carbon—diamond, mostly—but with some fullerenes for lubrication and energy-storage. There were no metals or explosives in it; no circuitry. Only intricate levers and ratchets, greased by fullerene spheres. It fired spin-stabilised diamond flèchettes, drawing its power from the relaxation of fullerene springs coiled almost to breaking point. You wound it up with a key, like a clockwork mouse. There were no aiming devices, stabilising systems or target acquisition aids.

None of which would matter.

I slipped the gun into my coat pocket, certain that none of the pedestrians had witnessed the handover.

“I told you I’d sort you out with something tasty,” Dieterling said.

“It’ll do.”

“Do? Tanner; you disappoint me. It’s a thing of intense, evil beauty. I’m even thinking it might have distinct hunting possibilities.”

Typical Miguel Dieterling, I thought; always seeing the hunting angle in any given situation.

I made an effort at smiling. “I’ll give it back to you in one piece. Failing that, I know what to get you for Christmas.”

We started walking towards the bridge. Neither of us had been in Nueva Valparaiso before, but that didn’t matter. Like a good many of the larger towns on the planet, there was something deeply familiar about its basic layout, even down to the street names. Most of our settlements were organised around a deltoid street pattern, with three main thoroughfares stretching away from the apexes of a central triangle about one hundred metres along each side. Surrounding that core would typically be a series of successively larger triangles, until the geometric order was eroded in a tangle of random suburbs and redeveloped zones. What they did with the central triangle was up to the settlement in question, and usually depended on how many times the town had been occupied or bombed during the war. Only very rarely would there be any trace of the delta-winged shuttle around which the settlement had sprung.

Nueva Valparaiso had started out like that, and it had all the usual street names: Omdurman, Norquinco, Armesto and so on—but the central triangle was smothered beneath the terminal structure of the bridge, which had managed to be enough of an asset to both sides to have survived unscathed. Three hundred metres along each side, it rose sheer and black like the hull of a ship, but encrusted and scabbed along its lower levels by hotels, restaurants, casinos and brothels. But even if the bridge hadn’t been visible, it was obvious from the street itself that we were in an old neighbourhood, close to the landing site. Some of the buildings had been made by stacking freight pods on top of each other, each pod punctured with windows and doors and then filigreed by two and a half centuries of architectural whimsy.

“Hey,” a voice said. “Tanner fucking Mirabel.”

He was leaning in a shadowed portico like someone with nothing better to do than watch insects crawl by. I’d only dealt with him via telephone or video before—keeping our conversations as brief as possible—and I’d been expecting someone a lot taller and a lot less ratlike. His coat was as heavy as the one I was wearing, but his looked like it was constantly on the point of slipping off his shoulders. He had ochre teeth which he had filed into points, a sharp face full of uneven stubble and long black hair which he wore combed back from a minimalist forehead. In his left hand was a cigarette which he periodically pushed to his lips, while his other hand—the right one—vanished into the side pocket of his coat and showed no sign of emerging.

“Vasquez,” I said, showing no surprise that he had trailed Dieterling and me. “I take it you’ve got our man under surveillance?”

“Hey, chill out, Mirabel. That guy doesn’t take a leak without me knowing it.”

“He’s still settling his affairs?”

“Yeah. You know what these rich kids are like. Gotta take care of business, man. Me, I’d be up that bridge like shit on wheels.” He jabbed his cigarette in Dieterling’s direction. “The snake guy, right?”

Dieterling shrugged. “If you say so.”

“That’s some cool shit; hunting snakes.” With his cigarette hand he mimed aiming and firing a gun, doubtless drawing a bead on an imaginary hamadryad. “Think you can squeeze me in on your next hunting trip?”

“I don’t know,” Dieterling said. “We tend not to use live bait. But I’ll talk to the boss and see what we can arrange.”

Red Hand Vasquez flashed his pointed teeth at us. “Funny guy. I like you, Snake. But then again you work for Cahuella, I gotta like you. How is he anyway? I heard Cahuella got it just as badly as you did, Mirabel. In fact I’m even hearing some vicious rumours to the effect that he didn’t make it.”

Cahuella’s death wasn’t something we were planning on announcing right now; not until we had given some thought to its ramifications—but news had evidently reached Nueva Valparaiso ahead of us.

“I did my best for him,” I said.

Vasquez nodded slowly and wisely, as if some sacred belief of his had just been proved valid.

“Yeah, that’s what I heard.” He put his left hand on my shoulder, keeping his cigarette away from the coat’s pearl-coloured fabric. “I heard you drove halfway across the planet with a missing leg, just so you could bring Cahuella and his bitch home. That’s some heroic shit, man, even for a white-eye. You can tell me all about it over some pisco sours, and Snake can pencil me in for his next field trip. Right, Snake?”

We continued walking in the general direction of the bridge. “I don’t think there’s time for that,” I said. “Drinks, I mean.”

“Like I said, chill.” Vasquez strolled ahead of us, still with one hand in his pocket. “I don’t get you guys. All it would take is a word from you, and Reivich wouldn’t even be a problem any more, just a stain on the floor. The offer’s still open, Mirabel.”

“I have to finish him myself, Vasquez.”

“Yeah. That’s what I heard. Like some kind of vendetta deal. You had something going with Cahuella’s bitch, didn’t you?”

“Subtlety’s not your strong point, is it, Red?”

I saw Dieterling wince. We walked on in silence for a few more paces before Vasquez stopped and turned to face me.

“What did you say?”

“I heard they call you Red Hand Vasquez behind your back.”

“And what the fuck business of yours would it be if they did?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. On the other hand, what business is it of yours what went on between me and Gitta?”

“All right, Mirabel.” He took a longer than usual drag on his cigarette. “I think we understand each other. There are things I don’t like people asking about, and there are things you don’t like people asking about. Maybe you were fucking Gitta, I don’t know, man.” He watched as I bridled. “But like you said, it wouldn’t be my business. I won’t ask again. I won’t even think about it again. But do me a favour, right? Don’t call me Red Hand. I know that Reivich did something pretty bad to you out in the jungle. I hear it wasn’t much fun and you nearly died. But get one thing clear, all right? You’re outnumbered here. My people are watching you all the time. That means you don’t want to upset me. And if you do upset me, I can arrange for shit to happen to you that makes what Reivich did seem like a fucking teddy bears’ picnic.”

“I think,” Dieterling said, “that we should take the gentleman at his word. Right, Tanner?”

“Let’s just say we both touched a nerve,” I said, after a long hard silence.

“Yeah,” Vasquez said. “I like that. Me and Mirabel, we’re hair-trigger guys and we gotta have some respect for each other’s sensibilities. Copacetic. So let’s go drink some pisco sours while we wait for Reivich to make a move.”

“I don’t want to get too far from the bridge.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

Vasquez cleaved a path before us, pushing through the evening strollers with insouciant ease. Accordion music ground out of the lowest floor of one of the freight pod buildings, slow and stately as a dirge. There were couples out walking—locals rather than aristocrats, for the most part, but dressed as well as their means allowed: genuinely at ease, good-looking young people with smiles on their faces as they looked for somewhere to eat or gamble or listen to music. The war had probably touched their lives in some tangible way; they might have lost friends or loved ones, but Nueva Valparaiso was sufficiently far from the killing fronts that the war did not have to be uppermost in their thoughts. It was hard not to envy them; hard not to wish that Dieterling and I could walk into a bar and drink ourselves into oblivion; forgetting the clockwork gun; forgetting Reivich; forgetting the reason I had come to the bridge.

There were, of course, other people out tonight. There were soldiers on furlough, dressed in civilian clothes but instantly recognisable, with their aggressively cropped hair, galvanically boosted muscles, colour-shifting chameleoflage tattoos on their arms, and the odd asymmetric way their faces were tanned, with a patch of pale flesh around one eye where they normally peered through a helmet-mounted targeting monocle. There were soldiers from all sides in the conflict mingling more or less freely, kept out of trouble by wandering DMZ militia. The militia were the only agency allowed to carry weapons within the DMZ, and they brandished their guns in starched white gloves. They weren’t going to touch Vasquez, and even if we hadn’t been walking with him, they wouldn’t have bothered Dieterling and me. We might have looked like gorillas stuffed into suits, but it would be hard to mistake us for active soldiers. We both looked too old, for a start; both of us pushing middle age. On Sky’s Edge that meant essentially what it had meant for most of human history: two to three-score years.

Not much for half a human life.

Dieterling and I had both kept in shape, but not to the extent that would have marked us as active soldiers. Soldier musculature never looked exactly human to begin with, but it had definitely become more extreme since I was a white-eye. Back then you could just about argue that you needed boosted muscles to carry around your weapons. The equipment had improved since then, but the soldiers on the street tonight had bodies that looked as if they had been sketched in by a cartoonist with an eye for absurd exaggeration. In the field the effect would be heightened by the lightweight weapons which were now in vogue: all those muscles to carry guns a child could have held.

“In here,” Vasquez said.

His place was one of the structures festering around the base of the bridge itself. He steered us into a short, dark alley and then through an unmarked door flanked by snake holograms. The room inside was an industrial-scale kitchen filled with billowing steam. I squinted and wiped perspiration from my face, ducking under an array of vicious cooking utensils. I wondered if Vasquez had ever used them in any extra-culinary activities.

I whispered to Dieterling, “Why is he so touchy about being called Red Hand anyway?”

“It’s a long story,” Dieterling said, “and it isn’t just the hand.”

Now and then a bare-chested cook would emerge from the steam on some errand, face half-concealed behind a plastic breathing mask. Vasquez spoke to two of them while Dieterling picked up something from a pan—dipping his fingers nimbly into the boiling water—and nibbled it experimentally.

“This is Tanner Mirabel, a friend of mine,” Vasquez said to the senior cook. “Guy used to be a white-eye, so don’t fuck with him. We’ll be here for a while. Bring us something to drink. Pisco sours. Mirabel, you hungry?”

“Not really. And I think Miguel’s already helping himself.”

“Good. But I think the rat’s a touch off tonight, Snake.”

Dieterling shrugged. “I’ve tasted a lot worse, believe me.” He popped another morsel into his mouth. “Mm. Pretty good rat, actually. Norvegicus, right?”

Vasquez led us beyond the kitchen into an empty gambling parlour. At first I thought we had the place to ourselves. Discreetly lit, the room was sumptuously outfitted in green velvet, with burbling hookahs situated on strategic pedestals. The walls were covered in paintings all done in shades of brown—except that when I looked closer I realised they were not paintings at all, but pictures made of different pieces of wood, carefully cut and glued together. Some of the pieces even had the slight shimmer which showed that they had been cut from the bark of a hamadryad tree. The pictures were all on a common theme: scenes from the life of Sky Haussmann. There were the five ships of the Flotilla crossing space from Earth’s system to ours. There was Titus Haussmann, torch in hand, finding his son alone and in the darkness after the great blackout. There was Sky visiting his father in the infirmary aboard the ship, before Titus died of the injuries he had sustained defending the Santiago against the saboteur. There, also rendered exquisitely, was Sky Haussmann’s crime and glory; the thing he had done to ensure that the Santiago reached this world ahead of the other ships in the Flotilla, the ship’s sleeper modules falling away like dandelion seeds. And, in the last picture of all, was the punishment the people had wrought on Sky: crucifixion.

Dimly I remembered that it had happened near here.

But the room was more than simply a shrine to Haussmann. Alcoves spaced around the room’s perimeter contained conventional gambling machines, and there were half-a-dozen tables where games would obviously take place later that night, although no one was actually playing at the moment. All I heard was the scurrying of rats somewhere in the shadows.

But the room’s centrepiece was a hemispherical dome, perfectly black and at least five metres wide, surrounded by padded chairs mounted on complicated telescopic plinths, elevated three metres above the floor. Each chair had an arm inset with gambling controls, while the other held a battery of intravenous devices. About half the chairs were occupied, but by figures so perfectly still and deathlike that I hadn’t even registered them when I entered the room. They were slumped back in their seats, their faces slack and their eyes closed. They all bore that indefinable aristocrat glaze: an aura of wealth and untouchability.

“What happened?” I said. “Forgot to throw them out after you locked up this morning?”

“No. They’re pretty much a permanent fixture, Mirabel. They’re playing a game that lasts months; betting on the long-term outcome of ground campaigns. It’s quiet now due to the rains. Almost like there isn’t a war after all. But you should see it when the shit starts flying around.”

There was something about the place I didn’t like. It wasn’t just the display of Sky Haussmann’s story, though that was a significant part of it.

“Maybe we should be moving on, Vasquez.”

“And miss your drinks?”

Before I had decided what to say the head cook came in, still breathing noisily through his plastic mask. He propelled a little trolley loaded with drinks. I shrugged and helped myself to a pisco sour, then nodded at the décor.

“Sky Haussmann’s a big deal round here, isn’t he?”

“More than you realise, man.”

Vasquez did something and the hemisphere flicked into life, suddenly no longer fully dark but an infinitely detailed view of one half of Sky’s Edge, with an edge of black rising from the floor like a lizard’s nictitating membrane. Nueva Valparaiso was a sparkle of lights on the Peninsula’s western coastline, visible through a crack in the clouds.

“Yeah?”

“People around here can be quite religious, you know. You can easily tread on their beliefs, you’re not careful. Gotta be respectful, man.”

“I heard they based a religion around Haussmann. That’s about as far as my knowledge goes.” Again, I nodded at the décor, noticing for the first time what looked like the skull of a dolphin stuck to one wall, oddly bumped and ridged. “What happened? Did you buy this place from one of Haussmann’s nutcases?”

“Not exactly, no.”

Dieterling coughed. I ignored him.

“What, then? Did you buy into it yourself?”

Vasquez extinguished his cigarette and pinched the bridge of his nose, furrowing what little forehead he had. “What’s going on here, Mirabel? Are you trying to wind me up, or are you just an ignorant cocksucker?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was just making polite conversation.”

“Yeah, right. And you just happened to call me Red earlier on; like it just slipped out.”

“I thought we were over that.” I sipped my pisco. “I wasn’t trying to rile you, Vasquez. But it strikes me that you’re an unusually touchy fellow.”

He did something. It was a tiny gesture which he made with one hand, like someone clicking their fingers once.

What happened next was too fast for the eye to see; just a subliminal blur of metal and a breeze-like caress of air currents being pushed around the room. Extrapolating backwards, I concluded that a dozen or so apertures must have slid or irised open around the room—in the walls, the floor and the ceiling, most likely—releasing machines.

They were automated sentry drones, hovering black spheres which split open along their equators to reveal three or four gun barrels apiece, which locked onto Dieterling and me. The drones orbited slowly around us, humming like wasps, bristling with belligerence.

Neither of us breathed for a few long moments, but it was Dieterling who chose to speak in the end.

“I guess we’d be dead if you were really pissed off at us, Vasquez.”

“You’re right, but it’s a fine line, Snake.” He raised his voice. “Safe mode on.” Then he made the same finger-clicking gesture he had done before. “You see that, man? It looked pretty similar to you, didn’t it? But not to the room it didn’t. If I hadn’t turned the system off, it would have interpreted that as an order to execute everyone here except myself and the fat fucks in the gaming seats.”

“I’m glad you practised it,” I said.

“Yeah, laugh about it, Mirabel.” He made the gesture again. “That looked the same as well, didn’t it? But that wasn’t quite the same command either. That would have told the sentries to blow your arms off, one at a time. The room’s programmed to recognise at least twelve more gestures—and believe me, after some of ’em I really get stung for the cleaning bill.” He shrugged. “Can I consider my point adequately made?”

“I think we’ve got the message.”

“All right. Safe mode off. Sentries retire.”

The same blur of motion; the same breeze. It was as if the machines had simply snapped out of existence.

“Impressed?” Vasquez asked me.

“Not really,” I said, feeling prickles of sweat across my brow. “With the right security set-up, you’d already have screened anyone who’d got this far. But I suppose it breaks the ice at parties.”

“Yeah, it does that.” Vasquez looked at me amusedly, evidently satisfied that he’d achieved the desired effect.

“What it also does is make me wonder why you’re so touchy.”

“You were in my shoes, you’d be a fuck of a lot more than touchy.” Then he did something that surprised me, taking his hand from his pocket, slowly enough that I had time to see there was no weapon there. “You see this, Mirabel?”

I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but the clenched fist he showed me looked normal enough. There was nothing deformed or unusual about it. Nothing, in fact, particularly red about it.

“It looks like a hand, Vasquez.”

He clenched the fist even harder and then something odd happened. Blood began to trickle out of his grip; slowly at first, but in an increasingly strong flow. I watched it spatter on the floor, scarlet on green.

“That’s why they call me what they do. Because I bleed from my right hand. Fucking original, right?” He opened the fist, revealing blood pouring out of a small hole somewhere near the middle of his palm. “Here’s the deal. It’s a stigma; like a mark of Christ.” With his good hand he reached into his other pocket and pulled out a kerchief, wadding it into a ball and pressing it against the wound to staunch the flow. “I can almost will it to happen sometimes.”

“Haussmann cultists got to you, didn’t they,” Dieterling said. “They crucified Sky as well. They drove a nail into his right hand.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Shall I tell him?”

“Be my guest, Snake. The man clearly needs educating.” Dieterling turned to me. “Haussmann’s cultists split up into a number of different sects over the last century or so. Some of them took their ideas from penitential monks, trying to inflict on themselves some of the pain Sky must have gone through. They lock themselves away in darkness until the isolation almost drives them insane, or makes them start seeing things. Some of them cut off their left arms; some even crucify themselves. Sometimes they die in the process.” He paused and looked at Vasquez, as if seeking permission to continue. “But there’s a more extreme sect that does all that and more. And they don’t stop there. They spread the message, not by word of mouth, or writing, but by indoctrinal virus.”

“Go on,” I said.

“It must have been engineered for them; probably by Ultras, or maybe one of them even took a trip to see the Jugglers and they screwed around with his neurochemistry. It doesn’t matter. All that does is that the virus is contagious, transmittable through the air, and it infects almost everyone.”

“Turning them into cultists?”

“No.” It was Vasquez speaking now. He had found a fresh cigarette for himself. “It fucks with you, but it doesn’t turn you into one of them, got that? You get visions, and you have dreams, and you sometimes feel the need…” He paused, and nodded towards the dolphin jutting from the wall. “You see that fish skull? Cost me a fucking arm and a leg. Used to belong to Sleek; one of the ones on the ship. Having shit like that around comforts me; stops me shaking. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“And the hand?”

Vasquez said, “Some of the viruses make physical changes happen. I was lucky, in a way. There’s one that makes you go blind; another that makes you scared of the dark; another that makes your left arm wither away and drop off. You know, a little blood now and again, it doesn’t bother me. At first, before many people knew about the virus, it was cool. I could really freak people out with it. Walk into a negotiation, you know, and start bleeding all over the other guy. But then people started finding out what it meant; that I’d been infected by cultists. ”

“They started wondering if you were as razor-sharp as they’d heard,” Dieterling said.

“Yeah. Right.” Vasquez looked at him suspiciously. “You build up a reputation like mine, it takes time.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Dieterling said.

“Yeah. And a little thing like this, man, it can really hurt it.”

“Can’t they flush out the virus?” I said, before Dieterling pushed his luck.

“Yeah, Mirabel. In orbit, they’ve got shit that can do it. But orbit’s not currently on my list of safe places to visit, you know?”

“So you live with it. It can’t be that infectious any more, can it?”

“No; you’re safe. Everyone’s safe. I’m barely infectious now.” Now that he was smoking again he was calming down a little. The bleeding had stopped and he was able to slip his wounded hand back in his pocket. He took a sip from his pisco sour. “Sometimes I wish it was still infectious, or that I’d saved some of my blood from back when I got infected. It would have made a nice going-away present, a little shot of that in someone’s vein.”

“Except you’d be doing what the cultists always wanted you to do,” Dieterling said. “Spreading their creed.”

“Yeah, when instead I should be spreading the creed that if I ever catch the sick fuck who did this to me…” He trailed off, distracted by something. He stared into the middle distance, like a man undergoing some kind of paralytic seizure, then spoke. “No. No way, man. I don’t believe it.”

“What is it?” I said.

Vasquez’s voice dropped subvocal, though I could see the way his neck muscles kept on moving. He must have been wired for communication with one of his people.

“It’s Reivich,” he said finally.

“What about him?” I asked.

“The fucker’s outsmarted me.”

A maze of dark, damp passages connected Red Hand’s establishment to the interior of the bridge terminal, threading right through the structure’s black wall. He led us through the labyrinth with a torch, kicking rats out of the way.

“A decoy,” he said wonderingly. “I never figured he’d set up a decoy. I mean, we’ve been following this fucker for days.” He said the last word as if it should have been months at the very least; implying superhuman foresight and planning.

“The lengths some people’ll go to,” I said.

“Hey, ease off, Mirabel. It was your idea not to waste the guy the instant we saw him, which could easily have been arranged.” He shouldered through a set of doors into another passageway.

“It still wouldn’t have been Reivich, would it?”

“No, but when we examined the body we might have figured out it wasn’t him, and then we could have started looking around for the real one.”

“Guy’s got a point,” Dieterling said. “Much as it pains me to admit it.”

“One I owe you, Snake.”

“Yeah, well, don’t let it go to your head.”

Vasquez sent another rat scurrying for the shadows. “So what really did happen out there, that made you want to get into this vendetta shit in the first place?”

I said, “You seemed reasonably well informed already.”

“Well, word gets around, that’s all. Especially when someone like Cahuella buys the big one. Talk of a power-vacuum, that kind of shit. Thing is, I’m surprised either of you two made it out alive. I heard some extreme shit went down in that ambush.”

“I wasn’t badly injured,” Dieterling said. “Tanner was a lot worse off than me. He’d lost a foot.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. “The beam weapon cauterised the wound