World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (27 page)

“All right, we get it,” said Dev. “You’ve been a bad boy. You screwed up. You’re scum. So you’ve put on a hair shirt and it’s itching nicely. Wallowing in your misery makes you feel better. Hooray. But you can’t keep it up forever. Haven’t you, you know, paid the price yet? Done your penance? Besides, this Plusser, ‘Ted Jones,’ whatever he got you to do for him, it wasn’t your fault. You were hypnexed. Brainwashed.”

“I realise that. But it doesn’t change what I did. I gave him what he needed, the key to his goals. Willingly.”

“No. You
thought
you were doing it willingly. You weren’t. All this time you’ve been punishing yourself, but he tricked you. He wasn’t even a person, prof. He was a digital entity slotted into a purpose-built meat puppet. Ted Jones wasn’t real. He was a fictitious character, a charade. A Plusser passing himself off as human. You need to get your head around that.”

“Absolve yourself of guilt, Professor Banerjee,” Trundell urged. “Forgive yourself. Give yourself a break.”

“Give
me
a break,” Stegman muttered under his breath.

“Come with us,” said Dev. “We’ll fly you to Calder’s. I can get ISS to take you in. You’ll get a full processing and debriefing. They’ll unpick the hypnagogic exposure, get rid of any last lingering effects, rinse you all out. Like a spring-clean for your brain. You can return to your post at Harvard.”

“They’ll never have me back.”

“They might,” said Trundell. “They should. I’ll vouch for you.”

“You can see your family again,” said Dev. “Pick up where you left off.”

“They think I’m dead. Let them mourn. Let them move on and enjoy their lives without me.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dev snapped. “Enough of the pity party. We can fix this, prof. We can undo whatever it is you’ve done. Come along. We’re heading back into Lidenbrock,
with
you, and you can take us to find Ted Jones.”

“What?” said Stegman. “We’re going to the arcjet, aren’t we?”

“With a detour to Ted Jones’s place first. I’m sure Banerjee still remembers where it is.”

“I think so,” said the moleworm expert. “I doubt he’ll be there, though. I haven’t seen him in a long while.”

“Either he is or he isn’t. But as long as there’s a chance he is, we can’t pass it up. So let’s make tracks. Professor?”

Banerjee wavered, casting a glance at the guano-splattered hide that had become his home, then down at the net bag containing the broken-necked blindwarblers that had become his staple diet.

“I’m not actually giving you a choice,” Dev said. “I’m evicting you from that damn hide. I’ll set fire to it if I have to. You need to help me out, and you need to do that by taking me to Ted Jones. Who knows, you may get the opportunity to watch me seriously fuck him up. Wouldn’t that be worth the trip?”

Numbly, but with a faint glimmer of cheer, Banerjee nodded.

“And while we’re walking, keep talking.”

29

A
S THEY MADE
their way towards the barricade, Banerjee said, “We weren’t just studying the moleworms. Ted declared his intention to trap one, too. I advised against. I said it was foolhardy in the extreme, a recipe for getting yourself killed. I didn’t want my wonderful friend Ted to die. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I would rather have lost a member of my own family than him. Ridiculous! But that was how I felt.”

“Did he manage it?” Dev said.

“Trapping one? Yes, he did. I helped, of course. We put a couple of my hides to use, taking them apart and reconfiguring the panels to make a kind of large bottomless cage. We tethered a scroach as bait and prodded it with a shock stick to make it hiss. Nothing like the hissing of a scroach in distress to bring a moleworm running. It’s better than any dinner bell.”

Trundell turned and glowered at Banerjee. “That was a bit mean.”

“Please let’s not get carried away,” the zoologist said. “A scroach is just an insect. Not one of the higher orders of creature. Its brain is barely bigger than a mushroom.”

“Even so. They’re not yours to torture.”

“Well, we can discuss the rights and wrongs of that another time. With the scroach properly agitated and making its displeasure loudly known, we raised the cage above it with a rope and pulley and waited for a moleworm to come along. One did – a male eastern. Rather an elderly chap. As he grabbed the scroach and started eating, we dropped the cage.”

“I’ve seen moleworms in action,” said Dev. “No way can a cage like you’re describing hold one. Not for long.”

“Ah, that was the beauty of it. We’d drugged the scroach, you see. Pumped it full of tranquillisers. The moleworm only had to swallow a few mouthfuls, and he became slow and lethargic. Also, we’d designed the cage so that it pinned the moleworm down. Imagine it as a tortoise’s shell, with gaps at the base for the limbs and head. Once it was in place, the moleworm couldn’t gain leverage to shake it off. Nor could he burrow down to escape.”

“And he was doped up to the eyeballs anyway.”

“Correct. He did his best to wriggle out of the trap, but in vain. It was touch and go, but in the end he acquiesced. He lay there immobilised, snorting, nasotentacles rippling feebly – a proud beast humbled.”

“What did Ted Jones do with him?”

“He had me take samples. Blood. Skin. Even saliva. Then we let the moleworm go free.”

“Samples...”

Dev’s theory about the moleworms was starting to gain weight.

Organic re-creation.

A Plusser with fresh DNA from a live moleworm could do all sorts of things. He could mimic the sequencing. Tinker with it. Build his own moleworm from scratch, if he had the laboratory resources.

The Plussers had used organic re-creation during the war. There were their zombie clone battalions – fleshly footsoldiers who acted as cannon fodder, temporarily inhabited by Plusser sentiences. There were also instances when large, vicious predatory animals had been genetically enhanced, fitted with control implants and used as shock troops: giant lizards, smilodons with patches of leathery armour plating, the gargantuan praying mantises found on Groombridge 1830 E.

Using native fauna as weapons was more a psychological tactic than anything. The animals succumbed to gunfire far more easily than mechs, and would sometimes resist the control implants and run away from battle instead of into it. They were inefficient and unreliable.

There was something unnerving, nonetheless, about a planet’s wildlife rising up against you and attacking in quantity. It was as though the planet itself hated you.

Dev could recall only too well being on the receiving end of an assault by a pack of coyote-like caniforms on Epsilon Indi A, better known as Shamo. It was a planet whose landmasses were mostly given over to desert, bathed in bronze light from its orange-dwarf sun.

The caniforms had invaded the encampment at night, breaching the perimeter fence and rampaging between the pop-up shelters. They weren’t much bigger than golden retrievers, but there were hundreds of them, and their ferocity was terrible. They had a berserker’s immunity to pain and damage. It could take as many as ten shots to bring one down.

Tests conducted later showed that the caniforms were all in fact replicated from a single DNA specimen. Polis+ had mass-produced them and turned them loose. Casualties had been low, but for days afterwards, talk at the camp was about nothing other than the attack. Some soldiers took fangs from the caniforms’ corpses to wear round their necks as trophies. Others said they wouldn’t be able to look at the family mutt in the same way again.

Dev, for his part, would never forget the creatures’ cries. They had howled in more or less perfect unison, a rising-falling sound like an air raid siren emanating from a thousand throats at once. He knew that Polis+ must have orchestrated that too, in the realisation that it would raise the hackles of anyone who heard it.

If Plussers had been able to breed and manipulate caniforms on Shamo, why mightn’t one of them be able to do the same with moleworms here on Alighieri?

He was about to make this point to Banerjee when, all at once, there was a yell from up ahead.

“There they are! I see ’em!”

Dev glimpsed figures at the barricade, two of them, three, worming through the gap that he and Zagat had made.

Kobolds.

“Let’s get them!” a different voice called out. “Mayor Major wants them alive, but he says he’s not fussy. Dead’ll do just as well.”

Dev couldn’t help but marvel at the Kobolds’ recklessness. They could have had the drop on him and the others. They could have lain quietly in wait and sprung an ambush.

But no, they’d shouted at the top of their lungs, giving away their position and sacrificing the element of surprise.

Stupid
barely began to cover it.

Which didn’t mean they weren’t still a threat.

He shunted Banerjee aside, instructing him to take cover.

Zagat was already making a beeline for the Kobolds, moving with considerable grace and speed for someone as bulky as he was.

Stegman stepped in front of Trundell. He was under orders to protect the xeno-entomologist, and Dev was pleased to see him taking his duties seriously.

Dev followed Zagat’s lead, racing to confront the Kobolds. The gang members – four of them now, all told – were pulling weapons. Dev drew his hiss gun. Zagat unholstered a mosquito.

Shots ripped the air. Projectiles gouged the tunnel walls.

Dev sank into a crouch and, choosing his aim carefully, returned fire. A Kobold dropped to the ground.

The rest of the Kobolds scattered, panicking. They could dish it out, but they didn’t like it coming back at them. Two of them hid among the moleworm skeletons. The third blundered straight into Zagat. It was probably the biggest mistake of his life.

Dev fired at the other two Kobolds, who were crouching behind a moleworm ribcage. He didn’t have clear line of sight, however. The hiss gun blasted, bone chips flew, but the Kobolds were well-shielded.

Then he noticed that his knee was resting next to one of the piles of dried moleworm dung. A few ordure ants were patrolling outside the entrance to their faecal nest. Each was a good two centimetres from abdomen tip to head, with mandibles half as long again.

Dev smiled.

Trying not to think too hard about what he was touching, he scooped up the dung pile with one hand and lobbed it over the ribcage like a grenade.

It hit one of the Kobolds smack dab on the head.

Dev felt a sharp pinch. His hand had been in contact with the dung for scarcely half a second, yet an ordure ant had still managed to rush out and clamp itself onto the ball of his thumb. The points of its mandibles dug in excruciatingly deep.

He squashed the insect to a pulp against a rock.

Looking up, he saw the Kobold swatting frantically at his hair and heard the man’s gasps and gags of revulsion.

Gasps turned to screams as the ordure ants, now very angry, crawled over him in full force. They scurried onto his face, down his neck and inside his clothing.

The single mandible bite Dev had suffered had hurt like a son of a bitch; the Kobold was being bitten by hundreds of the ants. He danced a spastic dance as though a high-voltage electric current was going through him. Blood glinted and splashed. The other Kobold didn’t make a move to help him, just backpedalled away in horror.

Ants poured into the Kobold’s mouth, and his screams became horrid wet retches. As the insects turned their attention to his eyes, Dev looked elsewhere. The man was no longer a danger to anyone.

Zagat finished pounding the Kobold who had run into him. The gangster’s body hung limp from his hands. Meanwhile, Stegman had managed to manoeuvre himself into a position where he had a clear shot at the fourth and last Kobold. He brought him down with his mosquito.

A half-minute firefight. No casualties for Dev and his team. A good result.

They might not be so fortunate next time, however. Not unless Dev levelled the playing field.

“Is that all you’re carrying?” he asked the two policemen. “Non-lethal pacification weapons?”