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
“IT 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.”
“Trundell,” 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 infrequency of such encounters at the time he was writing.”
“The animals migrated,” said Kahlo. “We displaced them.”
“To here.”
Trundell spun the Alighieri schematic through a half turn. Another spherical dot popped up, which he labelled Lidenbrock City.
“Lidenbrock. That was where Banerjee travelled next. He spent a year and a half among the Lidenbrockers, cataloguing moleworm movements, mating rituals and suchlike.”
“I don’t envy him that,” said Kahlo.
“Watching moleworms fuck?” said Dev.
“Rubbing shoulders with Lidenbrockers.”
“Ah, yes,” said Trundell. “He does mention from time to time how primitive the living conditions were and how challenging he found it associating with the locals. ‘Colourful’ is, I think, the kindest description he had for them. His rented accommodation was burgled five times during his stay.”
“Only five?” said Kahlo. “He got off lightly.”
“Nonetheless he managed to produce a scholarly text on moleworms, a classic of its kind. Of particular note is the fact that there are two very slightly divergent subspecies. Banerjee dubbed them the western and eastern moleworm. Not terribly imaginative taxonomy, but it’ll serve. The western moleworm is the type that was once found in abundance around Calder’s and Xanadu.”
“And the eastern is the Lidenbrock strain.”
“Quite so, chief.”
“No one calls the chief of police ‘chief,’ Trundell. ‘Captain’ is the accepted form of address.”
“I beg your pardon, captain. Anyway, as I was saying, the two types of moleworm aren’t easy to tell apart. The eastern’s nasotentacles – its snout feelers – are a little bit longer, and its skin colour tends towards a richer pink than the western’s. Banerjee observed some cross-breeding between the subspecies, but also intense, almost tribal rivalries.”
“They hated one another, except for the occasional love story,” said Dev. “Even moleworms have their Romeo-and-Juliet moments.”
Trundell threw a glance at Kahlo as if to say, Does he ever stop clowning around? She, in return, offered him a despairing grimace.
“Here are shots of both kinds,” Trundell said, “so you can see for yourselves.”
Two pictures of moleworms appeared side by side on the floatscreen.
“Yeah,” said Dev, “that’s not horrendous in any way.”
“On the left, the western. On the right, the eastern. Spot the differences?”
“That one’s ugly,” said Dev, pointing to the western moleworm. Then he pointed to the eastern. “And that one’s butt-ugly.”
“The pinker hue? The slightly longer nasotentacles?”
“Okay,” said Kahlo. “So, all very fascinating. But...”
“But where am I going with this?” said Trundell. “Very well. Mr Harmer, which subspecies of moleworm did we run into yesterday?”
“The subspecies that likes to eat people? How should I know? I was busy trying to keep us from ending up as moleworm scat. I didn’t have time to stop and take a long, hard, scientific look.”
“Myself, I’m pretty sure it was an eastern.”
“Really?”
“Ninety per cent sure. Perhaps even ninety-five. Its feelers were more like those” – Trundell enlarged the right-hand picture – “than those” – he enlarged the left – “and its skin was definitely on the darker side, at least as far as one could tell in the negligible light.”
“The eastern moleworms have come halfway round the world to visit us,” said Kahlo. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Not with any degree of certainty,” Trundell replied. “A single sighting of an eastern moleworm does not constitute proof of anything other than that we’ve seen one of them. However, it is intriguing. Banerjee commented that the eastern subspecies was not apt to stray from its ranges. It was fiercely territorial and treated the western as an interloper.”
“Maybe the one you met was a rogue.”
“Could be. But I was prompted, out of curiosity, to examine footage taken in Xanadu of a moleworm that ventured onto public property just last month. Here it is.”
It was a shaky, first-person clip lasting half a minute. A moleworm was crawling across a shopping mall plaza, looking bewildered and bedazzled. People were shouting and screaming, dropping their bags and running away from the creature in terror.
“The Xanaduan who took this used the iWitness feature in their commplant,” Trundell said, “then sold it to a news feed.”
“I’m waiting for a kitten to turn up and do something cute,” said Dev.
The moleworm blundered nose first into a shopfront. Shaking its head in distress and pain, it began spading up the plaza’s tiled floor, scrabbling to make its escape.
The clip ended.
“I heard about that incident,” said Kahlo. “It happens now and then. In Calder’s, too. Moleworms are digging along, and break through into some part of the city by accident. They don’t hang around for long, if they can help it. The noise freaks them out.”
“Yes, but...” Trundell rewound to the clearest shot of the creature. He blew up and enhanced the image. “Look. It’s an eastern.”
The moleworm’s skin was distinctly a shade of rose.
“Could it be the same one you two came across?”
“No, that was a female. This is a male.”
He zoomed in on the creature’s underside, between its back legs.
“Moleworms exhibit sexual mimicry,” he said. “The external genitalia of both genders look alike, at a cursory glance. However, see that fleshy projection there? You’ll note that there is no aperture at the base of it, which tells us it’s a phallus rather than a peniform clitoris extruding from a vagina.”
“I am so regretting I ever looked at that,” groaned Dev. “My eyes.”
“Again, Professor Trundell,” said Kahlo, “this is all very fascinating, but if you can cut to the chase...”
“All right, all right. I believe it’s possible that eastern moleworms have made their way to Calder’s and Xanadu, perhaps in large numbers. Why? It could be that their feeding grounds around Lidenbrock City have become compromised somehow. Or it could be that there’s been an population explosion and some of them have had to travel in search of pastures new.”
“And...?”
“And that’s all I have.” Trundell spread out his hands. “Mr Harmer wanted me to report back. These are my preliminary findings.”
Kahlo leaned back. “Well, that was a big fat waste of time. So we have moleworms on the move. So what?”
Dev raised an index finger. “I beg to differ. It may actually have some bearing on the general situation.”
“In what way?”
“Prof, moleworms burrow, right?”
“Absolutely. With great speed and efficiency. You’ve seen it first-hand.”
“I’m remembering, when that one was chasing us, its burrowing made quite a tremor.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Harmer?” said Kahlo.
“I’m just airing an idea. It may be ridiculous. You can call me an idiot if you like. But could the moleworms be causing the earthquakes?”
22
“AN EARTHQUAKE IS a sudden release of energy within the planetary crust,” said Kahlo. “It occurs along a fault plane on the boundary between tectonic plates, where they interact. It’s a spontaneous, natural geologic
al phenomenon. A moleworm can’t make one happen by burrowing. That’s absurd.”
“But Calder’s Edge isn’t near a plate boundary,” said Dev.
“You can still get quakes some distance from a plate boundary. A fault hundreds of kilometres away can be responsible for disturbances deeper into the plate where there are irregularities in the geological makeup. The strain can spread far, affecting areas outside the immediate zone of deformation.”
“You know your stuff.”
“Too right I do. I’ve researched the shit out of earthquakes since we started having them. But like I told you yesterday, Calder’s Edge is where it is because there’s supposed to be no chance of even the smallest tremor here. The colonisation precursor survey was thorough and detailed.”
“And the mines themselves aren’t somehow to blame? That’s beyond question?”
“I’ve spoken to geological engineers. They’ve assured me it can’t be mining that’s triggering the quakes. Induced seismicity events – that’s human-caused tremors – produce only low-level seismic yields. Mining can unsettle the integrity of the rock bed, no doubt about it. In the past there’s been the occasional rock burst, where the wall of a shaft fractures because the drilling has resulted in a pressure imbalance. There’ve been sinkholes too, from cavern collapse. But that’s as far as it goes. Nothing severe enough to match earthquakes of the magnitude we’ve been experiencing.”
“Might the effect of the mining be cumulative?” said Trundell. “What if, after a while, an area becomes so riddled with workings that a kind of chain reaction of instability builds?”
“I asked the engineers that myself. They said no. They site new tunnels precisely so as to avoid the likelihood arising and shore up old ones by backfilling them with waste material if the new ones look like they might have to be bored too close for comfort. There is no direct correlation between drilling for helium-three and the quakes.”
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