Nagorny, though, was not so well protected.
It had not been easy—the rush of air had almost drowned out her voice as she screamed the appropriate instructions into the bracelet. Agonising moments had followed before the ship seemed to take any notice of her.
Then—dutifully—it had moved to her whim.
Later, she had found Nagorny. The ten gees of thrust, sustained for a second, would not ordinarily have been fatal. Volyova had, however, not whittled her speed down to zero in one go. She had achieved that through trial and error, and with each impulse Nagorny had been flung between ceiling and floor.
She had been hurt herself; the impacts with the side of the shaft as she fell had broken one leg, but that was healed now and the pain no more than a foggy memory. She remembered using the laser-curette to remove Nagorny’s head, knowing that she would need to open it to get at the dedicated implants buried in his brain. They were delicate, those implants, and because they had come into being through laborious processes of mediated molecular growth, she would not be best pleased if they had to be duplicated.
Now it was time to remove them.
She took the head out of the helmet, immersing it in a bath of liquid nitrogen. Then she pushed her hands into two pairs of gauntlets suspended above the workbench within a scaffold of pistons. Tiny, glistening medical instruments whirred into life and descended on the skull, ready to slice it open in pieces which would later lock back together with fiendish precision. Before reassembling the head, Volyova would insert dummy implants so that—if the head were ever examined—it would not seem as if she had removed anything from it. It would have to be re-attached to the body, too—but there was no need to worry herself too much over that. By the time the others found out what had happened to Nagorny—what she was going to convince them had happened—they would not be in a hurry to examine him in any kind of detail. Sudjic might be a problem, of course—she and Nagorny had been lovers, until Nagorny went insane.
Like many others that remained before her, Ilia Volyova would cross that bridge when she came to it.
In the meantime, as she delved deep into Nagorny’s head for what was hers, she began to give the first thought to who was going to replace him.
Certainly no one now aboard the ship.
But perhaps around Yellowstone she would find a new recruit.
“Case, are we getting warm?”
The voice came back, blurred and trebly through the mass of the building above her. “So warm we’re incandescent, dear girl. Just hold on and make sure you don’t waste those toxin darts.”
“Yes, about those, Case, I—”
Khouri dived aside as three New Komuso trooped past, their heads enveloped in basketlike wicker helmets. Shakuhachi—bamboo flutes—cut the air ahead of them like majorettes’ staffs, dispersing a gang of capuchin monkeys into the shadows. “I mean,” she continued, “what if we take out a collateral?”
“It can’t happen,” Ng said. “The toxin’s keyed directly to Taraschi’s biochemistry. Hit anyone else on the planet and what they’ll have to show for, it is a nasty puncture wound.”
“Even if I hit Taraschi’s clone?”
“You think you might?”
“Just a question.” It struck her that Case was unusually jumpy.
“Anyway, if Taraschi had a clone, and we killed him by mistake, that would be Taraschi’s problem, not ours. It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.”
“When I’m gripped by existential boredom,” Khouri said, “I might try it.”
She stiffened, then, because all of a sudden it was different. Ng was silent, and in place of his voice was a clear pulsing tone. It was soft and evil, like the echolocation pulse of a predator. She had heard that tone a dozen times in the last six months, each time signifying her proximity to the target. It meant that Taraschi was no more than five hundred metres away. That fact, coupled with the onset of the pulse, strongly suggested that he was within the Monument itself.
The moves of the game were now public property. Taraschi would know it, for an identical device—implanted in a secure Canopy clinic—was generating similar pulses in his own head. Across Chasm City, the various media networks which concentrated on Shadowplay would even now be sending their field teams across town to the location of the kill. A lucky few would already be in the vicinity.
The tone hastened as they walked further under the Monument’s concourse, but not quickly. Taraschi must have been overhead—actually in the Monument—so that the relative distance between them was not changing swiftly.
The concourse beneath was cracked by land subsidence, lying perilously close to the Chasm. Originally there had been an underground mall complex beneath the structure, but the Mulch had infiltrated it. The lowest levels were flooded, sunken walkways emerging from water the colour of caramel. The tetrahedron of the Monument was elevated well above the concourse and the flooded plaza by a smaller inverted pyramid abutted deep into rock foundations. There was only one entrance to the structure. That meant that Taraschi was as good as dead already, if she caught him aside. But to reach it she had to cross a bridge across the plaza, and her approach would be obvious to the man inside. She wondered what kind of primal thoughts were slipping through his mind now. In her dreams, she had often found herself in some half-deserted city being chased by some implacable hunter, but Taraschi was experiencing that terror in reality. She remembered that in those dreams the hunter never had to move quickly. That was part of its unpleasantness. She would run desperately, as if through thickened air with weighted-down legs, and the hunter would move with a slowness born of great patience and wisdom.
The pulsing quickened as she crossed the bridge, the ground beneath her feet wet and gritty. Occasionally the pulsing would slow and requicken, evidence that Taraschi was moving around in the structure. But there was no real escape for him now. He could arrange to be met on the roof of the Monument, perhaps, but in utilising aerial transport he would forfeit the terms of the contract. In the parlours of the Canopy, the shame of that might be less desirable than being killed.
She walked through into the atrium within the Monument’s supporting pyramid. It was dark inside and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. She slipped the toxin gun out of her coat and checked the exit in case Taraschi had planned to sneak out. His absence was unsurprising, the atrium almost empty, ransacked by looters. Rain drummed on metal. She looked up into a suspended cloud of rusted, damaged sculptures hung on copper cables from the ceiling. A few had fallen to the marbled terrazzo, metal birds’ wings stabbing into the ground with the impact. They were softly defined in dust, its whiteness like mortar between the primary feathers.
She looked towards the ceiling.
“Taraschi?” she called. “Can you hear me yet? I’m coming.”
She wondered, briefly, why the television people had not yet arrived. It was strange to be this close to the termination of the kill and not have them baying for blood around her, along with the usual impromptu crowd which they invariably drew.
He had not answered her. But she knew he was above the ceiling, somewhere. She walked across the atrium, towards the spiral staircase that led higher. She climbed quickly, then cast around for large objects she could budge, to obstruct Taraschi’s escape route. There were plenty of ruined exhibits and pieces of furniture. She began to assemble an obstructing pile atop the staircase. It would hinder Taraschi more than block his exit completely, but that was all she needed.
By the time it was half done she was sweating and her back was stiff. She took a moment to collect herself and take in her surroundings; the constant arpeggiating note in her head confirming that Taraschi was still nearby.
The upper part of the pyramid had been dedicated to individual shrines to the Eighty. These little memorials were set in recesses within the impressive black marble walls which rose partway to the dizzyingly high ceilings, framed by pillars adorned with suggestively posed caryatids. The walls, pierced by corniced archways, blocked her view for a few tens of metres in any direction. The three triangular sides of the ceiling had been punctured in places; sepia shafts of light entering the chamber. Rain fell in steady streamers from the larger rents. Khouri saw that many of the recesses were empty; evidently, those shrines had either been looted or the families of those members of the Eighty had decided to remove their memorials to some safer place. Perhaps half remained. Of those, roughly two-thirds had been arranged in a similar manner—images, biographies and keepsakes of the dead, placed in a standard fashion. Other exhibits were more elaborate. There were holograms or statues, even, in one or two grisly cases, the embalmed corpses of the actual people being celebrated, doubtless subjected to some skilled taxidermy to offset the worst damage wrought by the procedure which had killed them.
She left the well-tended shrines alone, plundering only those that were obviously derelict, even then uncomfortable with the act of vandalism. The busts were useful—just large enough to move if she got both fingers under the base. Rather than placing them in an ordered pile at the top of the stairs, she just let them drop. Most of them had had their jewelled eyes gouged out already. The full-size statues were much harder to move, and she managed to shift only one of them.
Soon her barricade was done. For the most part it was a rubble-like pile of toppled heads, dignified faces unembarrassed by what she had done to them. The pile was surrounded by smaller, foot-tangling bric-a-brac: vases, Bibles and loyal servitors. Even if Taraschi began to dismantle the pile to reach the stairs, she was sure she would hear him doing it and be able to reach the site long before he was finished. It might even be good to kill him on that pile of heads, since it did slightly resemble Golgotha.
All this time she had been listening to his ponderous footsteps somewhere behind the black dividing walls.
“Taraschi,” she called. “Make this easy for yourself. There’s no escape from here.”
His reply sounded remarkably strong and confident. “You’re so wrong, Ana. The escape’s why we’re here.”
Shit. He was not supposed to know her name.
“Escape is death, right?”
He sounded amused. “Something like that.”
It was not the first time she had heard such eleventh-hour bravado. She rather admired them for it. “You want me to come find you, is that it?”
“Now that we’ve come this far, why not?”
“I understand. You want your money’s worth. A contract with as many clauses in it as this one couldn’t have come cheap.”
“Clauses?”—the pulse in her head shifting minutely, rhapsodically.
“This weapon. The fact that we’re alone.”
“Ah,” Taraschi said. “Yes. That did cost. But I wanted this to be a personal matter. When it came to finalities.”
Khouri was getting edgy. She had never had an actual conversation with one of her targets. Usually it would have been impossible, in the roaring bloodlust of the crowd she generally attracted. Readying the toxin gun, she began to walk slowly down the aisle. “Why the privacy clause?” she asked, unable to sever the contact.
“Dignity. I may have played this game, but I didn’t have to dishonour myself in the process.”
“You’re very close,” Khouri said.
“Yes, very close.”
“And you’re not frightened?”
“Naturally. But of living, not dying. It’s taken me months to reach this state.” His footsteps stopped. “What do you think of this place, Ana?”
“It think it needs a bit of attention.”
“It was well chosen, you must admit.”
She turned the aisle. Her target was standing next to one of the shrines, looking preternaturally calm, almost calmer than one of the statues which watched the encounter. The interior rain had darkened the burgundy fabric of his Canopy finery, his hair was plastered unglamorously to his forehead. In person he looked younger than any of her previous kills, which meant he was either genuinely younger or rich enough to afford the best longevity therapies. Somehow she knew it was the former.
“You do remember why we’re here?” he asked.
“I do, but I’m not sure I like it.”
“Do it anyway.”
One of the shafts of light falling from the ceiling shifted magically onto him. It was only an instant, but long enough for her to raise the toxin gun.
She fired.
“You did well,” Taraschi said, no pain showing in his voice. He reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall. The other touched the swordfish protruding from his chest and prised it free, as if picking a thistle from his clothes. The pointed husk dropped to the floor, serum glistening from the end. Khouri raised the toxin gun again, but Taraschi warded her off with a blood-smeared palm. “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “One should be sufficient.”
Khouri felt nauseous.
“Shouldn’t you be dead?”
“Not for a little while. Months, to be precise. The toxin is very slow-acting. Plenty of time to think it over.”
“Think what over?”
Taraschi raked his wet hair and wiped dust and blood from his hands onto the shins of his trousers.
“Whether I follow her.”
The pulsing stopped and the sudden absence of it was enough to make Khouri dizzy. She fell in a half-faint to the floor. The contract was over, she grasped. She had won—again. But Taraschi was still alive.
“This was my mother,” Taraschi said, gesturing at the nearest shrine. It was one of the few that were well-tended. There was no dust at all on the woman’s alabaster bust, as if Taraschi had cleaned it himself just before their meeting. Her skin was uncorrupted and her jewelled eyes were still present, aristocratic features unmarred by dent or blemish. “Nadine Weng-da Silva Taraschi.”