“Light!” Hotep hollered, pointing. Her goggles must have been working overtime, because there was sure as hell nothing there when Mao looked. Lupé took it on faith, though, and four heartbeats and a near-collision later they all saw it, a beacon white like burning phosphorus, casting shadows even through the dust. They steered for it like a sinking ship for land, seeing walls loom before them that were, at least, more than just the bare bones of buttresses and scaffolding. Seconds later Lupé was skidding the ’Bug into a sharp turn to avoid just ploughing straight into concrete, and they skittered madly along a windowless expanse of pitted grey, then on to a wall of abraded glass, great man-high panels of it all tessellated together, uneven and patched, some of them covered with corrugated iron or plastic.
“Vehicle bay?” Mao yelled, lunging past Lupé’s shoulder to point. Probably it wasn’t, but it would serve if they could fit the vehicle in there, and who cared what the original purpose was in that case? Lupé gamely slung the car towards the vague shadow: seven closed roller-doors and two hanging open. Things crunched and shattered under the tyres as the ’Bug scooted under cover, and they brought a lot of the dust in with them. Still, it was out of the worst of it, and for a good half-minute after they dragged to a halt, the three of them just stared at each other and tried to calm their breathing.
Then Hotep pulled up her bandana, securing it in place under the nosepiece of her goggles.
“I suppose we better go see where the fuck we are,” she suggested.
LUPÉ INSISTED THEY clear the caked dust off the panels and out of the vents first, not a long job with the three of them working at it. By that time they had a good idea of what sort of place they had found. A factory, certainly—they were at the door-end of a warehouse, the far end of which had collapsed in on itself, then been tarpaulined over. Mao reckoned there wasn’t much life left in the makeshift repairs, but also that they’d been recent, within months rather than years.
There was another tarp fallen away from the entrance they’d driven in through, and a little work had it hooked up and keeping the driving dust out, at least for now. Then they took a break, tapped the filtration tanks that took up the whole back half of the ’Bug and ate some chewies. Chewies had the consistency of toffee, a taste so packed with artificial additives that there was no natural thing they truly resembled, least of all whatever extinct fruit or savoury was on the wrapper. Mao got chicken dumpling, Hotep had chocolate—she always had chocolate—and Lupé’s bar had a picture of some brown cup-shaped thing none of them could identify.
“Turd,” Hotep decided eventually. Lupé tried it and declined to call her a liar.
It didn’t matter, of course. It was all of it bugs. So the Kandjama Complex had seen better days, there were still plenty others up the coast from Libreville, or over on the New China Bay. They just migrated north and south, those places, as the heat got worse, and that was more for the convenience of the humans who operated them. There was nothing like a bug for tolerating the heat.
Way long-back they’d tried to grow plants that could deal with almost no water and daytime temperatures of sixty C. Mao imagined them cross-breeding wheat and sweet potato with cactus somehow, but probably there was more science to it than that. It hadn’t been economical to farm, not in the end. In the desert belt the world had put on, even the cacti came up stunted or died. The last flourish of bioscience, in the face of this new world they’d all made, was to breed drought-resistant insects, taking the already hardy strains and making them ever more self-reliant. And then grinding them up and turning them into chewies.
It felt weird to be grinding away at the protein bars here where they’d maybe been made, like walking over someone’s grave. Still, Mao tried to put a brave face on it. “Mmm, good,” he exclaimed, like he’d have done at home over family cooking, making the most of the little they had.
“Vai good, really taste the…” Lupé looked at her wrapper again. “Turd,” she conceded.
Hotep had cut hers into neat squares and was popping them into her mouth like each was an experiment. Right now, though, she was looking to the far end of the room, at the tarp sagging beneath a slowly sloughing burden of dust.
“Power,” she observed brightly. “Lights are on. Someone’s home.” Her goggles were doubtless picking something up.
“You think it’s that simple?” But power came from somewhere. Were Kandjama’s own solar farms still in operation? Or was there a great big tap on the cable that led to Ankara Achouka?
“Not enough here to bother the sonko, surely,” Lupé said.
“Depends what they’re doing. We’re not going anywhere until the dust calms. Might as well take a look.”
They had to wait for Hotep to finish up her finicky eating, but Mao knew that hurrying her would just be laying in some explosion of bad temper for later, erupting out of a clear sky when least expected. Besides, just sitting back and resting was a luxury for a Firewalker. Once the storm died down, they’d be trying to make twenty hours of travelling in a day, everything except the harshest hours of noon, with pills every four hours to keep them sharp. He wasn’t looking forward to the crash after they got back. But at least they’d be back.
He felt Lupé’s eyes on him, as Hotep slurped down the last cubes of chewie. As usual, he found his shoulders going back, his chest out, like he was some punk kid—meaning, a year or two younger than he was. Force of habit, though. He and Lupé had hooked up last year for a short while, tried out each other’s bodies, had about three days of thinking it was going to be The Big Thing. Then it got awkward. Then Mao’s mother had found out and given him a thrashing because what was wrong with that good Vietnamese girl he’d been seeing a month before? Three more days of it being The End Of The World, at the end of which Mao had the surprising revelation that having Lupé about as his mech, his back-up, his friend was more important to him than the rest of it. Besides, he’d heard she was a steady thing with Nolo Amachi now, the girl who ran the office for Contrôleur Attah, so maybe that was another reason things hadn’t quite clicked between them.
There was a locked metal door from the warehouse into the rest of the complex, a segmented steel thing someone had padlocked twice. Lupé was good with locks; they were through in an instant, into the weirdly cavernous silence of the factory floor. Nothing was running, but the lamps strung up above shed a flat, grey light over the ranks of stilled conveyor belts, the presses, the labellers. A sheet of uncut plastic half-fed through one machine bore still-bright colours and a happy anthropomorphic banana, just delighted to be the chosen flavour for some batch of bugs that would never be processed. Its mouth was curved into a manic grin, but its cartoon eyes seemed to be pleading for release.
Halfway through that machine reliquary, a voice called out, “M’bolani! Awe! Welcome, welcome!” chasing its own echoes so much it might have come from anywhere. A man’s voice, high and strained. Mao had his hand into his plated vest immediately, touching the grip of his gun. He’d not had to fire it in almost a year, nor even draw it. He didn’t want to break that record, either.
“Am’bolo,” he responded: Hello to you too.
“Are you here from head office, come to…?” the voice called, and simultaneously, Lupé said, “Left,” and Mao twitched that way, seeing movement. A man was cautiously approaching between the machines, ducking under belts, stepping over disconnected cables. The windowless factory floor was still stuffy and close, but he had on a full suit and tie, like someone from a drama set long-back, before the world went wrong. He was dark, balding on top, hair greying and wild from ear-level down as though caught midway through an escape attempt. He was taller than any of the Firewalkers, but all angles, like someone constructed from uneven lengths of pipe.
“We’re from the Ankara,” Mao told him. “Come to get out of the storm.”
“You want to see the year’s end…?” the man said, as though those last few words just hadn’t happened.
“You’re who, exactly? Is it just
you, here?” Lupé asked.
“You know me,” the man said, sounding hurt. “Okereke. Just M. Okereke, the manager. Assistant manager. This is my facility until... I run things here.” Said with such pride Mao half-expected the whole circus to spring to life, complete with singing midget workforce.
“Doing what?” Hotep had a way of speaking so you knew she was wrinkling her nose in disgust even if you couldn’t see it.
“I thought you… might have more orders…?” Okereke’s enthusiasm began to give out. “Or wanted to see how we’d done. Only it’s just me, now. Just me, after the last batch, you know. But I’ll do my best, with what we’ve got…”
“Which is what?” Lupé asked, apparently now being Serious Inspector From Head Office. “Show us.”
A yellow grin split M. Okereke’s face like an ill-favoured moon. He straightened his ragged tie. “Come with me. I’ll give you the tour.”
There were tanks in the basement, big concrete vats that would have seethed with maggots or shrimp or some damn bugs. The air still stank vaguely of writhing life, or perhaps decay, but of the miniature chewies-in-waiting there were no survivors. The bottom of each pit was a drift of husks and chitin.
“Of course it became uneconomical to…” M. Okereke tried to explain, his hands describing entirely independent sketches in the air. “Mass production at this facility was… but that doesn’t mean we can’t still handle the bespoke! We’re proud, vai proud to service our demanding clients.”
Hotep knew what ‘bespoke’ meant, so at least Mao felt he was learning something. Not a word he felt he’d have much use for. “Bespoke what, though?” he asked. “Like, new flavour research?” Distantly he could still hear the storm hissing sand about the edges of the building, or he’d be on his way back to the ’Bug right now.
“Research, exactly,” Okereke didn’t seem to say half of what he meant or hear half of what he got in response. “You were happy with the batch of…”
“Sure, vai happy,” Lupé reassured him. “Maybe you could show us…?”
“Of course, yes,” and he was dancing them through to further rooms, past desks mounded with dust and the carcases of escapee insects, brittle beetle shells, the dull jewels of dead flies mounded up like a miser’s hoard. Then into the laboratories, big buried rooms where the fans still ran to cool the outside air and drag it down into the earth.
The lamps here were dim, but still drawing power from somewhere. The bank of equipment at the near end didn’t look like it was doing anything, and Mao could only guess at most of it. Hotep flitted over instantly and started flicking switches, though, turning little lights from green to red and back, making a comic dumbshow of trying to fit a goggle lens to the eyepiece of a microscope. Or probably a microscope; Mao could only guess at it all.
Things moved.
He jerked back towards the doorway even as he heard Lupé exclaim. There were bugs in the room, and they weren’t in the big tanks that lined one wall, because someone had apparently gone at those tanks with a hammer. Fragments of glass crunched underfoot.
Okereke let out a shrill laugh, in that moment the most horrifying sound Mao ever heard. In the next the man’s hastily-composed face admitted nothing of it. “All a little outside our usual…” he said, almost a whisper. “Still, the funding was… We were able to achieve…” As though he was a radio, words eaten away by waxing static. He was still padding further into the room, every footstep grinding through broken pieces.
“Experimental, hey?” Mao asked nervously. There were locusts, not a lot of them but everywhere he looked he spotted at least one. They somehow looked simultaneously over-large and stunted, and they were dead silent, but then he’d heard that the low-water breed they’d worked up for the protein farms didn’t chirp, because otherwise the cacophony would have driven the workers crazy. Except Okereke seemed to have gone that way anyway, so maybe they shouldn’t have bothered.
With disturbing swiftness, Okereke plucked one of the live locusts from a nearby cabinet. “Oh, not these, these are the last of the previous… They’ve found water, food somewhere, just a nuisance, really. I keep saying we should take steps to… Who has the time, though?” For a moment Mao thought he was going to pop the wriggling insect into his mouth, but instead he crushed it, yellow innards flowering about his fingers, to be fastidiously wiped away with a tissue. Then he was heading further into the dim room, and Mao followed, because losing sight of the man felt worse than the bugs.
“So, tell us about your research, M. Okereke,” Lupé called, turning to stare at the broken tanks as they advanced, crunch, crunch, crunch. And some of those crunches were the carpet of shattered glass, and some were locusts too indolent to take evasive action,
“But you know…” came the man’s voice from the gloom ahead.
“In your own words, if you would,” Lupé prompted him seamlessly.
“Of course. It was very exciting, the codes… Nothing we’d ever considered, you must tell me how you…” His words like trying to watch a film through a hole in the wall, without paying for admittance to the cinema. “We had to completely re… and the…” Leaking unspoken nouns and adjectives so badly that Mao half-felt them grind underfoot with the glass and the bugs. “But a triumph, you’ll agree!” And something flared in Okereke then. He turned back to them, one hand up, finger lifted towards heaven. “Everyone said it was a waste of our time, better we get the protein works back online, make food. But what’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs compared to some real science? We had such discussions in the…”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” Hotep broke in, making Mao jump. He’d thought she’d been left behind, but here she was at his elbow, scarf down to her chin. Okereke didn’t seem to hear the question, and then Lupé leant in to Mao and murmured, “All this glass.”
“I don’t think cleaning the place is top of his mind,” Mao agreed, but Lupé was shaking her head.
“Almost none inside the tanks, chommie. All of it on the floor out here.”
Mao took a moment to process that, and Lupé called ahead, “M. Okereke, maybe you could tell us about the science behind this new work of yours. In your own words.”
“Well I’m just the administrator, of course. I don’t really understand the…” Again that awful giggle escaped and was recaptured. “My colleagues were very… Doctor Wing was talking about publishing, his ticket out of… oh, you know, science types… Unprecedented, they told me. So exciting… I mean, the sheer size…” And his voice shook, just on that word. His besuited composure cracked, and for a split second a terrified man was staring out at them from Okereke’s eyes. “They were all so pleased,” he whispered, “with the progress.”
“You keep saying, ‘they,’” Hotep pressed. She’d found some more switches, and a switch never went unflicked when Hotep was around. This time they did something, though. More lights came on, throwing the far end of the room into sharp relief.
There were more tanks, all just as broken as the rest. Broken outwards, just as Lupé had spotted. In the top far corner of the room, there was a ventilation duct that was now just a hole, worked at and chewed away until it had become a dark burrow a foot and a half across.
“I’m sorry that release of the subjects was premature,” Okereke went on. “In the end, containment facilities were… I’ve sent a message to the manufacturers, but… My colleagues were most distressed.”
At that far end, there was practically nothing standing. Equipment had been knocked over or broken up, the edges ragged with gnawing. The panels of the walls were peeled back, bent or snapped, edges mealy and scalloped. At first Mao thought someone had just blasted the whole vista with acid, but then he started thinking about lots of busy teeth and wished he hadn’t.
“Fukme,” Lupé said slowly. Because there were bones there, pristine, not a scrap of flesh on them. They were scattered, but Mao saw at least three skulls. Any clothing was gone, just as with the meat, the protein, and the bones themselves were abraded an
d scraped.
“There was a problem with the final report, of course,” Okereke said. “We had collected experimental data, but… In the end it wasn’t possible to…” His eyes sought them out, each in turn, begging an absolution his mouth had lost the words for. “I was the only… I wasn’t qualified to write a report, in the end. In the end…”
Lupé was already backing away, and Mao with her. Hotep lasted longest, in the dry, picked silence after M. Okereke had nothing more to say, but by the time the others had got back to the lab entrance, she was running to catch up.
THE DUST STORM had passed, by then, and horror or no horror they had a job to do. Mao and Lupé were to go trace the power, see what the facility was drawing and whether it was the problem. Hotep, under protest, was to stay with the ’Bug to fight off any incursions by crazed administrators or… other things. Hotep was also to use her tech savvy to try and use some combination of vehicle and local comms to hail Achouka and tell them something had gone off the rails here. Tell them about Okereke, too, because someone should come and get him and take him somewhere better, because maybe, away from the facility, he might find some of those lost words and be able to come back to himself and give a better account of what had happened.
It turned out the facility was drawing only what meagre power its own solar field was putting out, nothing stolen from the rich folks’ aircon back at the Hotel. What Lupé discovered, though, accounted for all the low lighting inside. The field itself had been…
“Cannibalised,” was her word for it. The expanse of gleaming black silicon, all those square panels, had been turned into a madman’s chessboard, units plucked seemingly at random, and no trace of where they’d gone. Mao reckoned maybe half of the whole had been pirated, and the rest were scratched, cracked, coated with dust. Small wonder the Protein Complex was running on empty.
“You reckon he did it?” A jerk of the head towards the looming concrete shell, the thin shadow of which was just enough to shelter them from the worst of the sun.
Firewalkers Page 4