Dev sensed movement ahead – a rustle of footfalls. He called out Glazkov’s name and the footfalls sped up. He hurried after them, bent over to give his head clearance.
The tunnel forked, but Glazkov was not so far ahead that Dev couldn’t determine by sound alone which of the two paths he had taken.
“Glazkov! Running’s not the answer. I just want to talk to you some more.”
“Fuck off, pig,” came the reply.
“If you’re not Polis Plus, you’ve nothing to fear.”
“Leave me alone.”
Dev came to another fork. This time, there were three divergent routes to choose from.
Glazkov, in a sudden fit of cunning, had decided to stand still. Whichever of the three tunnels he had taken, he wasn’t going to advertise his position by continuing to run. He was hiding down one of them, just out of sight, staying silent, controlling his breathing.
Dev inspected the entrance to each, looking for a sign, tracks of some sort. The floors were slick with moisture, but solid rock. Not a footprint to be seen.
Guesswork, then. Process of elimination.
He took the left hand tunnel. It descended at a shallow gradient, kinking at an angle every couple of dozen paces. Finally it opened out into a dome-shaped chamber where Dev could once again, to his relief, stand upright.
All around him were encrustations of a fine pale crystal mineral. Some growths were rounded and lumpy, others branched outward in snowflake-like fronds. In the glow cast by patches of slime mould, they sparkled faintly.
This was a giant geode, a cavity formed by a gas bubble rising from Alighieri’s molten core and cooling.
It was no dead-end, since a narrow fissure linked it to another, similar geode. Dev squeezed through the crack on his hands and knees, to find that this geode joined on to two more, and on and on. There was a clustered mass of the things, like geological foam, all interconnected.
In all likelihood this was where Glazkov had taken refuge. He seemed to know the layout of these tunnels intimately. He was sneaking through the geode maze, intending either to elude Dev or lead him astray.
Trouble was, it was working. On both counts.
Dev soon realised, to his dismay, that he had ventured too far into the crystal-lined labyrinth for comfort. He had been doing his best to log his progress, memorising the position of each geode relative to its neighbours. At some point, however, he had got muddled up. All at once, his mental map ceased to make sense and became more or less useless.
He doubled back, but the next geode he crawled into wasn’t immediately familiar to him. Nor was it unfamiliar. Had he been through this one already or not?
So he returned to the previous one, but here there were two other fissures to choose from, two possible ways out.
Shit.
Brilliant, Dev, he told himself. Just brilliant.
Not only had he lost his quarry, he’d lost his bearings. The damn geodes were all of similar dimensions and hard to tell apart. One set of glittery mineral outcrops looked much like another. He should have taken the precaution of leaving a trail. Markings scratched into the rock. Something so that he would be able to tell which way he had come.
He had been too eager, overconfident. Figuring a junkie like Glazkov wouldn’t be about to outwit him.
Now he was a bit fucked.
He reached out via commplant into the Alighierian insite. There would be a proper map cached there somewhere, surely. He couldn’t be the first person to have got lost down here. Given a 3D schematic of the geodes, he would be able to navigate back through to the tunnels, using his commplant’s GPS.
No service available.
“You what?” Dev exclaimed out loud. The close quarters and the jagged inner surfaces of the geode lent his voice a weird robotic timbre.
There was no signal. He couldn’t connect to the insite. He was too deep down, maybe. Out of range. Too much rock in the way. That or the composition of the geodes was somehow interfering.
Dev was not the kind who got easily flustered. He prided himself on that. Nor was he prone to claustrophobia.
Even so, he couldn’t help but feel a tingle of anxiety which, if he wasn’t careful, might easily escalate into full-blown panic.
It was time to get methodical. He started exploring again. Now he did make sure to mark the fissures, using a small scrap of rock. Little etched Ds that said Dev came this way.
Didn’t help. The geode maze seemed infinite. Many-layered, too; he was going up and down as well as sideways.
After what was probably an hour, but felt longer, he stopped for a breather. He sat on his haunches, wrists on knees, and tried to calm himself.
This was stupid. Lost underground. How had he let it happen?
One thing he was adamant about: he was not going to die down here. As long as he kept his head, didn’t flap, he would be all right. He would survive.
Think about it sensibly. Kahlo would notice his absence. Perhaps not straight away, but at some point. If not tonight, then tomorrow morning for sure. She would chase it up. She knew he had followed Glazkov. She was bright. Diligent. She would piece it together, work out where he had gone.
There would be a search party. Kahlo would arrange it. Alighieri must have dedicated cave-rescue squads on standby for just this sort of contingency. They would look for him down below Inferno. They would find him.
That was assuming Kahlo was concerned enough. Assuming she cared...
Dev smiled weakly. Kahlo didn’t care about him. But she cared about her job, her responsibilities. If an ISS consultant went missing, the company would want to know what had become of him, and Kahlo would be the person they leaned on. They’d demand answers from her, explanations. She had to be concerned about him if she valued her career.
Patience was what Dev needed now. The ability to sit tight and wait without succumbing to fear or despair.
He stretched his legs out, rested his hands on the geode floor...
Something under his left palm moved.
Dev sprang to his feet.
He had touched something hard. Smooth. Alive.
He looked down to see just about the most disgusting animal he had ever laid eyes on.
10
IT WAS THE size of a small dog, with a rounded shiny carapace and a dozen legs. A segmented tail curved over the top of its abdomen, tipped with a sharp, ugly point. A sting.
It had not liked having a hand placed on it. Now it stood stock still, its stance wary and aggressive. Two thick forelimbs were raised, pincers agape, waiting for Dev to make a move. It was sizing him up with a cluster of black, beady eyes set below a projecting chitinous brow, assessing just how much of a threat he presented. An ominous, rattling hiss issued from its multiple mouth parts.
Dev, too, stood stock still, biting back his revulsion.
The creature gradually, grudgingly, lowered its forelimbs. It trod sideways a few steps, then addressed itself to a patch of the bioluminescent slime mould on the geode wall. A smaller, secondary set of forelimbs extruded just below its stumpy head, like ultra-articulate mandibles, and with these it commenced scooping up the mould and popping it into a dextrous, rippling mouth, almost daintily fastidious.
Every now and then it swivelled towards Dev, tail twitching, and let out another hiss interspersed with soft clicks. This was as if to say: My slime mould. All mine. Stay away, or else.
Dev wished he could somehow tell the thing that he didn’t want its wretched mould. It could have the stuff all to itself. He didn’t want even to go near the animal, and he certainly didn’t want to come between it and its feast.
The creature was, he thought, like a cockroach crossed with a scorpion. Two nightmares in one – but bigger.
A moleworm gnawing a scroach.
That was how Thorne, the union leader, had described Dev, paying tribute to his tenacity. Dev had no idea what a ‘moleworm’ looked like but he would be very surprised if this thing in front of him wasn’t a ‘scroach.’
The name fit it to a T.
He began backing away, moving as slowly as a sloth, laying down one foot toe-to-heel, soundlessly, then the other. Every time the creature – the scroach – paused in its eating and turned towards him, he froze.
Was that sting deadly?
He thought so. Judging by the size of the topmost joint of the scroach’s tail, its venom gland had to have a good quarter-pint capacity. That much poison injected in to him would be agonisingly painful at the very least, more likely lethal. The sheer volume alone might trigger fatal anaphylaxis.
As he reached the nearest fissure that led out of the geode, Dev spied a second scroach crawling into view. It scuttled over to join the first beside the slime mould. There was a brief altercation. Forelimbs waved, pincers snapping open and shut. Pugnacious semaphore. Each creature unleashed a volley of irate chittering hisses at the other.
The new arrival was somewhat larger, and in the end the first scroach backed off, going to a smaller patch of mould.
Through the fissure Dev intended to exit by, a third scroach now appeared.
Oh, this was just splendid. Lovely. He was smack dab in the middle of a convention of oversized Alighierian arthropods. How many more of the buggers were there round here?
Pressing himself flat against the wall of the geode, Dev watched the three scroaches circle around one another. Their tails were up and swaying from side to side like cobras, dewdrops of venom glistening at the tips of their stings. Occasionally one of them would charge at one of the other two. A feint. Then another of them would retaliate with a feint of its own.
The hisses they made were now more or less continuous. The noises were raspy and slightly moist, like air escaping from a child’s balloon.
A fourth scroach turned up to join in the fun, and a fifth. The geode was beginning to get crowded.
The scroaches had to be coming from somewhere.
And just like that, Dev came up with a plan.
These creatures struck him as solitary rather than social. When they met up, they found it hard to get along.
Yet to have this many at once in the same place suggested they followed set routes. Feeding trails. They were scavengers who returned again and again to established sources of their yummy slime mould.
Chances were, they might not live in the geode maze at all. They might come from outside.
In which case, if he went in the opposite direction, contrary to the flow of traffic, it might just lead him to freedom.
Dev had to acknowledge that, as plans went, it wasn’t the soundest. It definitely wasn’t a sure thing. He might just wind up straying into a scroach nest – lair, den, whatever the place was called where Ma and Pa Scroach reared their young.
But it was far preferable to staying put in the geode with five – no, six now – hideous, bad-tempered giant insect beasties all spoiling for a fight.
Dev checked the fissure to see if yet another scroach was on its way through.
Then he dived in and wriggled smartly out the other side.
He loitered in this adjacent geode until a scroach emerged from one of the other fissures.
He wormed through that one too.
He went from geode to geode another three times before taking an enforced hiatus. The procession of scroaches had run out. No more of them coming.
Eventually he heard a faint scuttling from the nearest fissure. He bent cautiously to peer in.
The hugest scroach yet pounced from the crevice, forelimbs extended. Where the others were the size of a spaniel, this one was a full-grown labrador.
Before Dev could react, the creature seized his hand. It felt as though his fingers were trapped in a vice.
Dev reared backwards, trying to wrench himself free. The scroach’s pincer was clamped fast. It couldn’t bring its sting to bear yet – it was only part way out of the fissure – but all it had to do was advance a couple of steps and its tail would be in the clear.
Dev ignored the pain of the crushing pressure from the pincer. He also ignored – although this took some doing – the loathsome sensation of being touched by the scroach, the hard, slightly clammy feel of its exoskeleton on his skin.
The scroach pressed forward, nothing but deadly implacability in its myriad eyes. Its mouth parts worked furiously as it let out a string of vicious, menacing hisses.
Dev tried shunting it back into the fissure, but it was strong, and with his hand held tight, he couldn’t get the necessary leverage. The only tactic left was surprise.
Dev stopped pushing and instead pulled.
He yanked the scroach fully out of the fissure. Its feet scrabbled for purchase.
Quick!
Before the scroach could gather its wits and deploy its sting, Dev hauled it off the ground. He seized its tail with his free hand, at the joint just below the top segment.
He swung the monstrous insect against the wall. Once. Twice.
On the third impact the scroach’s pincer opened and let go.
Now Dev whirled it by the tail alone, double-handed, slamming the scroach even harder against the geode’s crystalline growths. He flailed the thing back and forth, this way, that way, and each time it hit the wall the sound was a little crunchier, a little squishier.
Shards of carapace flew. A foul-smelling custardy ichor spattered – the haemolymph that was the scroach’s blood. Slender brittle legs snapped off and fell.
Dev kept smashing and smashing the scroach until just about only the tail was left intact. The rest was a ragged, oozing butchery. Nameless innards and organs clung to the interior of the geode, some dangling in gelatinous dripping ribbons.
Panting hard, and close to puking, Dev tossed the mangled remnants of the insect aside.
“What did you have to go and do that for?” demanded an indignant voice behind him.
11
THE MAN WAS dressed in military-surplus protective outerwear, complete with a pair of gauntlets made of artificial spider-silk fibroins, lightweight but virtually impenetrable. His head was encased in mesh helmet not unlike a fencer’s. He flipped up the visor and blinked at Dev owlishly.
His face was skinny and slight, with a nose a little like a chicken’s beak. His corneas were sheathed in jet-black lenses with an iridescent sheen – image intensification contacts. He had a motion-sensitive tracking device strapped to his forearm.
“You mean kill that scroach?” Dev said, indicating the mess.
“Yes I mean kill that scroach. What did it ever do to you?”
“Er, tried to kill me.”
“Well, okay. Yes. Well, if it did, that wasn’t its fault. You must’ve alarmed it.”
“Not as much as it alarmed me,” Dev said. “You should have seen the size of it.”
“Mature adult male,” said the man, scrutinising the tail. “On his seventh, maybe eighth ecdysis. Which would put his age at about twenty-five. A venerable specimen.”
“Ecdysis?”
“The shedding of the cuticula. Moulting. You can’t get that big without going through a few exoskeletons.”
“You’re a scroach expert?” said Dev.
“Not yet, but I aspire to be.” The man pulled off a gauntlet and extended a hand. “Ludlow Trundell. Professor of xeno-entomology at the Qatar Institute for Extraterrestrial Sciences.”
“Dev Harmer. Amateur scroach squasher. No other relevant qualifications. You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake.” His fingers were sticky with a liberal coating of arthropod juices.
“No, I quite understand,” said Professor Trundell, withdrawing and re-gloving his hand. “And I apologise for sounding off at you just now. I’m not happy about what you did, but I can see the rationale. Clearly you don’t appreciate what a remarkable, wonderful creature Dromopoda alighieriensis is.”
“I don’t think this one appreciated what a remarkable, wonderful creature Homo sapiens is, either. Otherwise we mightn’t have had a problem.”
“You’re in his domain. You’re an intruder. What did you exp
ect? He’s going to want to defend himself.”
“Look, back that-a-way there’s a half-dozen more of the things that I didn’t destroy. I don’t think, on balance, that massacring one is too bad.”
“Such restraint,” said Trundell dryly.
“Listen, Trundle...”
“Trundell. Stress on the second syllable.”
“You obviously know your way around these geodes.”
“Been spelunking down here for over three months now,” said the xeno-entomologist proudly. He showed off his tracking device. “This helps me navigate. It’s got a detailed chart of the tunnels programmed in, on which I’ve marked common scroach migratory routes. But even without it, I doubt I’d get lost. I’ve become a bit of a tunnel rat during my researches.”
“So can you get me out and back up to civilisation?”
“I can,” said Trundell pedantically. “What you’re asking is, would I be willing to.”
“Would you?”
“I might. I’ve only just started work this evening, though. Scroaches are more active when they’re on Alighieri’s night side – my theory is it’s something to do with the slight temperature drop – so I’ve had to become somewhat nocturnal myself. I was planning to study them for another two or three hours.”
“I don’t want to hang around that long.”
“Then we are at an impasse.”
Dev restrained an infuriated sigh. “I’ll pay you.”
“I’m well-funded. My university is generous with its grants. Besides, you can’t put a price on pure science.”
“How about this, then? Help me or I’ll treat you much the same as I did this scroach. Protective gear won’t save you.”
Trundell gulped and blanched. “I’m not a man of violence.”
“Nor am I, unless provoked. The evidence for that is, I’d say, pretty conclusive.”
Trundell glanced around the gore-spattered geode.
“Fine,” he said. “Your argument is forceful and persuasive. Let’s go.”
World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Page 6