“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 and stopped the bleeding.”

“Oh yeah, right,” Vasquez said. “Just a flesh wound, then. I can’t get enough of you guys, I really can’t.”

“Fine, but can we talk about something else?”

My reticence was more than simply an unwillingness to discuss the incident with Red Hand Vasquez. That was part of it, but an equally important factor was that I just didn’t remember the details with any clarity. I might have before I was put under for the recuperative coma—the one in which my foot was regrown—but now the whole incident felt like it had happened in the remote past, rather than a few weeks ago.

I’d sincerely believed that Cahuella would make it, though. At first he seemed to have been the lucky one: the laser pulse had gone right through him without cleaving any vital organs, just as if its trajectory had been mapped in advance by a skilled thoracic surgeon.