World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (19 page)

Leather Hill.

It hadn’t even had a name before the battle, but it became synonymous with the worst slaughter ever seen in the Frontier War – or in any war waged by humans, for that matter.

Dev could not recall sleeping during the conflict. Perhaps a half-hour snatched here and there, a few stolen moments of blessed oblivion.

Otherwise, it was continual combat. A cacophony of noise – the jackhammering of ballistic guns, the
crunch
of explosions, the lightning crackle of beam weapons. Flashes and flickers, night-time as bright as daytime. Mechs churning the soil with their treads or whining through the air on cushions of electrogravitic pulse. Clods of earth thrown up by strafing bombardments. The howling of Polis+ zombie clone battalions as they charged en masse against artillery positions, overwhelming through sheer numbers, clogging the emplacements with several hundredweight of dead meat.

Dev survived almost to the end. He and his sapper unit moved through the carnage, making forays to set traps for Plusser tanks and robot divisions. They demolished mechs that had been disabled by missiles or shells but still housed their controlling sentiences, pinned to the shattered hulks by the jamming signal. It was mercy killing, after a fashion. They also provided infantry support when called for, joining the ordinary ranks in the struggle to hold ground against the oncoming Plusser hordes.

Then came the order to assault a modular robot battalion entrenched in a small depression, encircled on all sides by Terran forces. A Polis+ rearguard holdout that was inflicting severe damage even as the human military was making a concerted push forward, thrusting deep into enemy territory.

The beleaguered android mechs were fighting to the last. If one of them lost an arm or a leg to gunfire, it would simply scavenge a replacement component from the heaps of metal bodies lying around it. Occasionally the mechs would fuse themselves together in groups of three or four to create a towering, multi-limbed behemoth that would then go on a rampage, performing a wild suicide run in the hope of taking out as many of the opposition as it could before it was taken out itself.

It was one of these gargantuan atrocities that slew Dev. He would never forget – how could he? – the sight of it zeroing in on his unit, its limbs gangling and flailing with minimal coordination. Its several heads ululating a war cry, proclaiming in unison the majesty and supremacy of its god: “The Singularity! The Singularity! All hail the Singularity!”

Dev and his comrades unleashed volleys of muon beam fire and rocket-propelled homing grenades at the thing. Sections of its armour disintegrated, flying away like chaff. They crippled three of its eight legs.

Still it kept coming.

Limping, spurting yellow hydraulic fluid, guns blazing, it stumbled onto them. It whirled like a top, spraying them with kinetic rounds at more or less point blank range.

Dev’s death was not heroic, or dignified. He just succumbed like the men and women beside him to the hail of fire coming from the robot’s many coilguns. There was no glamour or glory, no last hurrah. There was only unprecedented agony, the violation of his body by countless projectiles travelling at eight thousand kilometres per hour – and then a period of strange numb serenity as he lay on the ground, torn and ruined, waiting for nothingness to come.

It came, falling like night, slowly, inevitably.

His last thought was:
I hope this was worth it
.

He meant his death, but he also meant the battle, the whole war. He hoped he had played a useful part in the conflict. He hoped there had been a point to it all, beyond TerCon’s imperative need to defend the parts of the galaxy Earth had planted its flag in.

“Harmer?”

Kahlo.

“You kind of tuned out there,” she said.

“Yeah? Sorry. Memory Lane. Sometimes it’s more like Memory Corridor of Ghastly Nightmares.”

“And he’s back.”

“Miss me?”

“Not even for a moment. You still haven’t explained. You died at Leather Hill... but you’re not dead?”

“Try not to sound so disappointed. I was technically dead for... I don’t know how long. It depends, I suppose, on how you define death. It’s a grey area. Bodily functions can cease while brain functions still continue. Put it this way: I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t conscious of anything. And then –”

Priority contact. Ludlow Trundell.

“Hold on. Someone’s calling me.”

Mr Harmer.

Professor Trundell. What have you got for me?

About the moleworms. I’ve found something.

That was fast. Go on.

I can send you the data, but it would be simpler if I showed you in person.

Are you saying I’m too thick to understand it without you walking me through it?

No! I would never.

It’s all right, prof. Just teasing. Let’s meet.

When?

Now would be good.

Where?

Dev glanced around Kahlo’s apartment.

I know a place.

21

“I
T MAY BE
significant,” said Trundell. “It may not. I thought I’d draw your attention to it anyway. See what you think.”

He produced a projector bar, placed it on the table, and activated it. A blank floatscreen winked into life a hand’s breadth above it.

“Yeah, that’s fine, Harmer,” said Kahlo. “Invite a friend over. Make yourself at home. It’s only my apartment.”

“You never said I couldn’t.”

“You told me you were meeting somebody. I assumed it would be elsewhere.”

“But your pad’s only a short train ride from where Trundle’s staying.”

“Trun
dell
,” said Trundell with a scowl.

“And I thought you might like to take a look at what he’s found out, whatever it is. I’m keeping you in the loop, like we agreed. Unless you’ve got important cop business you need to be attending to, of course.”

“And leave you here on your own, unchaperoned?” said Kahlo. “I’m not crazy. You’d only end up trashing the place somehow. Face it, your track record hasn’t been good so far.”

“Cruel,” said Dev. “But justified.”

“I could come back another time,” said Trundell, looking furtively from one to the other like a child whose parents were arguing. “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“You’re not,” Dev assured him. “Captain Kahlo likes a moan, that’s all. She’s one of those people who are only happy when they’re unhappy.”

The xeno-entomologist hunched his shoulders, uncomfortable. “Harmer, that’s the chief of police you’re talking to. Shouldn’t you be a bit more, you know, deferential?”

“Yeah, Harmer,” said Kahlo. “The man speaks truth. You should.”

“Oh, she loves a bit of backchat.”

“I do not.”

“She could throw you in jail for disrespecting a police officer,” said Trundell.

“Believe me, I’ve been tempted,” said Kahlo.

“Don’t worry,” said Dev. “We have this friendly antagonism thing going on, me and her. She likes me. She just can’t admit it.”

“Why not just show us what you have for us, Professor Trundell?”

“Okay. Yes. All right. Transferring the data onto the screen.”

Trundell frowned as he performed the commplant upload.

The first image that appeared was a high-res camera shot of Alighieri. The surface was a reddish brown mosaic of solidified lava flows, dotted with meteorite impact craters. Some of the craters were encircled by rings of ejecta. Lines of scarp extended for hundreds of kilometres, huge cliffs formed in the planet’s crust millennia ago when it was still in the early stages of development, cooling and shrinking.

“This,” said Trundell, “is... Well, you can see what it is.”

He match-cut the image with a transparent three-dimensional schematic of Alighieri, which he rotated on its axis until a pair of bright spherical dots came into view.

“Here are Calder’s Edge and its near neighbour Xanadu. I’ll label them for you so you know which is which.”

Each subterranean city’s name popped up alongside it.

“I don’t need a lecture on Alighierian geography, thank you,” said Kahlo. “Skip to the point, Trundell.”

“Oh. Er... I rather like to do things in sequence, if that’s all right, ma’am.”

“Yes, Kahlo, don’t hurry the man,” said Dev. “He’s methodical.”

“So,” said Trundell, “I delved into the literature about moleworms. I was up half the night, searching both the local insite and off-planet ones as well. There’s more stuff about them cached than I initially thought.”

“Aren’t you into scroaches?” said Kahlo. “As I recall, that’s what we gave you a permit for – to look at creepy-crawlies, not moleworms.”

“You’re quite right, ma’am. I forgot that you know who I am. Yours was one of the authorisations I needed in order to come to Calder’s and start my research, wasn’t it?”

“Personally I think you’re nuts. Why scroaches, when there are insects on other worlds ten times more beautiful and nowhere near as dangerous? If I was a xeno-entomologist, I’d dedicate myself to studying glimmermoths on Maness Four or those crystal beetles on Nuova Roma’s second moon.”

“I’m interested in scroaches because no one else is. You can’t move for papers on glimmermoths. Everyone and their aunt has written one. Whereas the humble scroach is a relatively undocumented beastie. That makes it a field in which I am a pioneer and, one day, with luck, will be hailed as the leading authority.”

“So why the switch to moleworms? No, don’t tell me. Harmer put you up to it, didn’t he?”

“Mr Harmer, ahem, suggested that it might be wise for me to pay attention to the habits of the scroach’s main predator.”

“I read that as him getting you to do his dirty work for him.”

“No. No! Actually, yes. Sort of. Our interests have coincided, you might say.”

Kahlo gave Dev a reproachful look. “You strongarmed him, Harmer. I know you did.”

“How can you think so little of me?”

“Because there’s no other way to think of you.”

“The professor is a highly intelligent young man. If he felt moved to volunteer to assist me in my endeavours, how could I refuse? Isn’t that right, Trundle?”

“It’s Trun– Oh, never mind. Now, according to existing studies of moleworm habits, they’re rarely to be found in this region of Alighieri. There are trails – old tunnels – suggesting there were once greater concentrations of them here than there are today. The theory is that, since colonisation, they’ve been driven away by human activity, the mining industry specifically. The evidence supports it. The old moleworm tunnels predate our arrival.”

“Where did they go?” Kahlo asked.

“As far away as possible. Right round the world, in fact. When the late, great Professor Banerjee came here back in ’oh-three, or maybe ’oh-four – just after the war ended, at any rate – he started by looking for
pseudotalpidae
in the vicinity of Calder’s Edge and Xanadu.”

“Pseudo-what?”

“Moleworms. He didn’t find as many as he was expecting, however. Mostly he just found the evidence of where they’d once been. There were long-abandoned nests and heaps of desiccated scat which he dated back to before the Diaspora.”

“He dated moleworm crap?” said Dev.

“Zoology isn’t a glamorous profession. Banerjee measured the amino acid racemisation of the shards of scroach shell in the scat and determined the vast majority of the samples to be almost sixty years old. He also examined anecdotal reports from first-generation colonists about the frequency with which they encountered moleworms and compared these with the relative
in
frequency of such encounters at the time he was writing.”

“The animals migrated,” said Kahlo. “We displaced them.”