Dev half-opened an eye. “Yeah, Trundle?”
Trundell’s face fell. “We’re back to that, are we?”
“What is it? I’m trying for a nap here.”
“Just to say, you remember you asked me if I wanted to follow in Professor Banerjee’s footsteps.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Did you know about Banerjee when you made that comment?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re aware he died in Lidenbrock City, aren’t you?”
Dev fully opened both eyes. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Ah, yes,” said Trundell. “That’ll be why you presented it to me as an incentive and not, in fact, the opposite.”
“How did he die?”
“No one’s sure. It’s not even clear if he did. He just... disappeared one day. He’d finished his paper on moleworms and submitted it for peer review. Everyone assumed he’d be on the next cruiser back to Earth, but he stayed on for a while at Lidenbrock, and then all at once he was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Incommunicado. Off the grid. Never heard from again. His paper was published anyway, and most academics regard it as his final, posthumous work.”
“Oh, well, that’s lovely,” said Dev. “You reckon a moleworm got him?”
“That would be the likeliest explanation. He got too close to one, got unlucky, got eaten. It can happen even to the most experienced zoologist. Occupational hazard when you’re around large dangerous carnivores all the time.”
“Or maybe Lidenbrockers were responsible,” Stegman chipped in. “Those trogs will kill you as soon as look at you. There’ve been rumours that they’re dangerous carnivores too – with a taste for human flesh.”
“Cannibals?” said Dev. “Surely not.”
“Never been confirmed,” said Stegman. “But over the years, you hear stuff, you know? Human bones found in kitchen waste disposal units. Butchers’ shops selling mystery meat that isn’t vat-grown. Kids going missing off the street.”
“What is this? Official Creep Dev Out day?”
“Well, they’re just rumours,” said Stegman impassively.
“Plenty of misconceptions about Lidenbrockers,” Beauregard said from the cockpit. He hadn’t been asleep after all, or else only shallowly. “You’ve just got to know how to deal with them, that’s all. They respect toughness. When I’m haggling with them, I stare them in the eye and I don’t back down. Works every time.”
Kahlo had told Dev that Beauregard’s arcjet operation was based around selling the Lidenbrockers luxury goods from Calder’s: quality booze, designer clothing, jewellery, food delicacies. She suspected he also peddled boutique narcotics, the non-TerCon-approved kind that Franz Glazkov traded in, but since the actual transactions took place out of her jurisdiction she was powerless to do anything about it.
Transporting passengers to and from Lidenbrock was very much a sideline for Beauregard. He would make a commodities run once a week, sometimes twice. A passenger run? Once in a blue moon. Lidenbrock wasn’t exactly a favoured destination, and its inhabitants seldom left.
“Anyhow,” said Trundell, “much as I admire Banerjee, I’ve no wish to end up like him – whatever happened to him.”
“But you’ve come all the same,” said Dev. “Braver than you look.”
“I guess I feel I’m doing something useful. Not that xeno-entomology isn’t useful,” he added. “But this seems like the bigger picture. The cosmopolitical picture. If I’m honest, deep down I’m thinking it’s pretty cool. Me, working for ISS in an advisory capacity. The guys back at the faculty would never believe it.”
“Geek,” said Dev, but he said it with warmth.
24
BANG ON SCHEDULE, Milady Frog began her descent towards Lidenbrock City. A ring of landing lights blazed into life around the ejector tube entrance. The arcjet plunged into the aperture like a falling meteor, Beauregard applying brake thrust only when she was several hundred metres deep into the tube.
He slotted her sideways into a docking bay. Then came a fifteen-minute wait until the hull tiles had cooled to the point where it was okay to exit without risk of getting singed.
Dev used the time to inventory his weapons. Before leaving Calder’s, he had obtained an override code from ISS that allowed him access to the arsenal at the outpost.
Picking his way through the creaking wreckage of the building, ducking under police hazard tape, he had thought about poor young Junius Bilk. The kid’s body had been reclaimed by his family for burial. Dev didn’t like to imagine how his parents must be feeling.
Bilk had served as an ISS liaison for three years, apparently. In that time he would have done nothing but kept the outpost tidy and functioning, studied the training update modules his bosses sent him, and hung on for the moment when he might, just might, be called to active duty.
All that tedium, and no sooner had he some proper work to do, no sooner had his patience been rewarded, than he was killed.
It sucked.
But then what part of life as an ISS employee didn’t suck? You had to make the best of it. Otherwise you’d shoot yourself.
The arsenal had yielded an array of location-appropriate hardware – short-range, non-explosive. Dev had selected a hiss gun, a ‘hair-splitter’ knife, and a couple of nano-frag mines. Each was so small and discreet that it could be carried in a pocket. He wanted to be tooled up without looking as though he was tooled up.
Now he checked his pockets one after another, reminding himself where each weapon was secreted.
If Lidenbrockers were as psycho nutzoid as everyone was saying, he might need every edge he could get.
Beauregard stepped out of Milady Frog first, leading his four passengers down the rear-loading ramp. The arcjet was still exuding heat, her metal inner structure ticking and groaning as it cooled. There was something of the crouching, high-haunched amphibian about her shape. Her name was a bit literal, but it suited her.
The handful of Lidenbrockers who had assembled to meet Beauregard and his passengers at the docking bay called themselves customs officers, but nothing in their appearance suggested bureaucracy or administration. They wore shabby casual clothing and carried an assortment of guns and other handweapons openly. All of them sported mo-tats – animated loops of writhing snakes, cavorting nudes and bleeding hearts etched on their skin in smart ink.
“My friends!” said Beauregard, arms spread wide. He had warned Dev and the others beforehand that any welcoming committee at Lidenbrock needed to be handled with a degree of finesse. Keep your mouths shut and leave the talking to me. “Human cargo only this time, as you see.”
The Lidenbrockers peered past him, every face an imperturbable mask, every gaze steely.
“Those two,” said one of them, singling out Stegman and Zagat. “Don’t like the look of them.”
The Calder’s Edge police officers were in plain clothes, incognito. Uniforms would be considered a provocation at Lidenbrock. In the absence of their regulation utility belts, they had various pacification weapons stashed about their persons, concealed like Dev’s.
Still, with their tight haircuts and stiff bearing, Stegman and Zagat couldn’t help looking like authority. Stegman even had his arms folded and his head tilted in the classic officious cop stance.
“Smell like pig to me,” said another of the Lidenbrockers. The man had a pair of short horns projecting from his forehead. His pupils were vertical slits in scarlet irises. Dev gathered from his preliminary research that plenty of Lidenbrock’s citizens went in for this sort of body modification, voluntarily dehumanising themselves. A statement of rebellion, rejecting standard Diasporan values.
Stegman bridled. “We’re –”
Beauregard spoke over him. “This is purely an informal visit. These gents are here to make a scientific survey.”
“What of?” said Horns.
“Moleworms.”
Someone laughed. “Good luck with that. Have
n’t seen any of those fuckers round here in an age.”
“They’re all gone?” said Trundell.
“Yeah, dickface, they’re all gone,” said Horns. “What’s it to you? Don’t tell me, you’re another of those stick-up-the-butt boffin types, come to tag the old moleys and tell us how amazing and fascinating they are.”
“Um, yes.” Trundell gave a nervous blink.
Horns stepped up close to him, leaning in until the bony nodules on his forehead were almost poking the xeno-entomologist’s face.
“Last guy that did that,” said Horns, “it didn’t work out so well for him. Professor Banana Tree or whatever his name was.”
“Banerjee.” Trundell couldn’t help himself. He was a stickler for correctness. Even when intimidated, even when it wasn’t going to do him any favours, things had to be right. “Not Banana Tree. Banerjee.”
Horns grinned. His teeth were modified, too, a mouthful of pointed, meshing fangs.
Trundell gulped quiveringly.
“Ooh, pardon me,” Horns said. “My bad. Obviously I haven’t had your education, have I? I’m just a thick dipshit troglodyte.”
“I – I never said that.”
“No, but it’s what you meant.”
“N-no. No.”
“Harvey,” said Beauregard to Horns. “He’s no one. Just a biologist. Leave him alone.”
“Hold on there, wingco.” Horns, a.k.a. Harvey, flapped at hand at Beauregard. “Me and the offworlder are talking. We need to get a couple of things straight. He’s calling me stupid, and I resent that.”
“Look, can we just process our passports and get on?” said Beauregard.
Passports, in this context, meant bribes. Lidenbrock City didn’t demand certified entry permits or work visas or suchlike. A substantial sweetener would get you through the gates, and once you were in the city itself, you were free to do pretty much as you pleased, although you might occasionally be required to pay a ‘tax’ levied by a neighbourhood gang leader or grease the palm of some self-appointed civic dignitary in order to make life easier for yourself and ensure that neither anything you owned, nor you yourself, got broken.
Dev could see the situation getting out of hand, unless someone acted to resolve it more forcefully and less mollifyingly than Beauregard. Trundell could react to Harvey’s bullying in one of two ways. Either he put up with it, and Harvey would regard that as a sign of weakness and inevitably escalate the verbal abuse to physical. Or he would snap back with some waspish retort, which Harvey would use as the perfect excuse to lose his temper. Both scenarios were destined to end in violence, and an injured Ludlow Trundell.
Time to intervene.
“Harvey, yeah? Is that your name?” Dev said.
The Lidenbrocker turned his reptilian eyes on Dev. “And who the fuck are you?”
Dev rabbit-punched him in the mouth, hard enough to shatter several of those serrated fangs.
Harvey went down, spitting blood and splinters of dentine.
“Oh, I forgot to introduce myself,” Dev said. “I’m the man who’s going to hit you. Should have said that first, shouldn’t I?”
As one, the remaining Lidenbrockers drew their guns and knives. Weaponry clattered and bristled. The air was filled with the clicking of cocked hammers and the hum of power cells charging up.
“No!” cried Beauregard. “There’s no call for this. No, no, no. Everyone calm down. Put those things away. We can sort it out. How much? My passengers can pay. How much do you need?”
The Lidenbrockers weren’t listening. They spread out in a line, moving to flank Dev and the others on both sides.
Stegman was glaring at Dev – now look what you’ve gone and done – whereas Zagat was concentrating on the Lidenbrockers, marking their relative positions, assessing the level of threat each posed. The deputy hadn’t said two words since boarding Milady Frog but, judging by his cool composure now, Dev had the impression he would be handy in a fight.
Good. Because it looked like it was going to come to that.
“We don’t want trouble,” Dev said.
“Should’ve thought of that before you decked Harvey,” said a Lidenbrocker with pointed ears and subdermal implants which gave his face a batlike cast.
“He got in too close. He was picking on my friend. We just want to be allowed to conduct our business. Beauregard’s right – we’ll pay for our passports or excise duty or whatever you like to call it.”
“Problem is,” said Batface, “Harvey’s a Kobold. We’re all Kobolds. Hit one of us and you’re hitting us all.”
The Kobolds were one of the many gangs who held sway in the city. They were in fact one of the largest and most powerful, controlling an extensive area of turf across Lidenbrock’s lower northern reaches.
“I respect that,” Dev said. “Tribal loyalty. Blood brotherhood. All very noble. But dick behaviour is still dick behaviour. Your pal Harvey was giving one of my team grief. You’d have done the same in my shoes.”
He thought he was getting through to them. Gangsters or not, these men surely had a code of honour.
“Harvey was being kind of a douche,” one said.
“Yeah,” said another. “That offworlder’s pretty pussy-looking. Trust Harvey to go for the runt when there’s all these bruisers standing around.”
Harvey, through pain and shattered teeth, moaned something about how he didn’t like being talked down to by eggheads who thought they were smarter than everyone else. It was insulting.
“So shall we settle this amicably?” Dev said. “You name a figure, we’ll try and meet it, everyone goes away happy and content. Yeah?”
Batface looked around at his comrades, and slowly nodded. “Reckon that could work. Price has gone up, though. Due to unforeseen circumstances. What do you say to double the going rate?”
Dev swiftly checked the balance of his ISS slush fund. What Batface was asking for would all but wipe it out. Didn’t matter. He could always put in a request for extra contingency money. Deep-pocketed ISS usually came through with the readies when asked.
“Deal.”
With that, the tension in the docking bay was defused and the standoff was over. The Kobolds stowed their weapons. They seemed to feel they had done a good day’s work, their successful act of extortion giving them a warm glow inside. Batface even directed a smile Dev’s way.
Then Harvey Horns rose to his feet with a furious growl and made a lunge for Dev.
And everything went to shit again.
25
HARVEY HAD PRODUCED a shimmerknife from inside his boot. An amplified piezoelectric actuator in the hilt sent ultrasonic waves through the six-inch carbon steel blade, making it vibrate at such a rate that it could literally carve through stone. The blade, when activated, became a sabre-shaped blur, as though you were seeing it through frosted glass.
The shimmerknife buzzed through the air in Harvey’s hand like an angry hornet. It was aimed at Dev’s head. Barely in the nick of time, Dev brought up a fist and blocked the strike, deflecting Harvey’s arm. The knife shaved a straight line through his hair, missing his scalp by millimetres.
Harvey pivoted, and Dev pivoted too. The Kobold’s lips and chin were smeared with blood, a crimson goatee. He was hurting, and he was livid.
He was also clumsy.
The next knife strike came in from the side, Harvey delivering the blow backhand at Dev’s throat. Dev reared back and the shimmerknife whistled past.
The thrust left Harvey momentarily off-balance, and Dev took advantage by seizing his knife arm. Holding the wrist with one hand, he pulled hard, at the same time driving the heel of his other hand into the side of Harvey’s elbow.
The hinge joint snapped laterally, loudly.
Harvey’s mouth gaped in a soundless rictus scream, revealing the reddened ruins of his teeth.
Dev added insult to injury by twisting the Kobold’s forearm so that the broken ends of the elbow grated together.
The shimmerknife fell
to the floor point first, embedding itself in the concrete up to the hilt guard.
Harvey fell too, passing out from pain.
All this had taken no more than five seconds, but already the other Kobolds were going into action, drawing their weapons again. It was pack instinct as much as anything. If one of their number went on the offensive, then whatever the reason, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the rest of them must too. Group solidarity first and foremost.
Deputy Zagat, however, was also on the move. The moment Harvey went for Dev, Zagat had seen where things were headed. He grabbed hold of the nearest Kobold from behind and kneed the man so hard in the base of the spine, and so accurately, that he was numbed from the waist down. The Kobold collapsed as though his lower half was boneless jelly.
Next instant, the big deputy had another of the Kobolds by the wrists. He spun the Lidenbrocker round and round like an Olympic hammer thrower until the man’s feet left the ground. Then he let go. The Kobold sailed across the docking bay, spinning, until he slammed headlong into a stack of plastic cargo crates.
He didn’t get up again.
Dev darted towards Batface, pulling out his hair-splitter knife as he went. The hair-splitter was to all intents and purposes a basic close-combat weapon, but its edge was honed to molecule-fine sharpness by an array of self-arranging nanowires embedded in its stellite alloy blade. Not only could it cut a hair in half down the middle, as the name suggested, but it could slice into any material short of diamond. Hence, its sheath was made from synthetic diamond.
Batface had a repro classic pistol in his hand, a fully working replica Glock 9mm of the type carried by old-school Terran street hoods. Gold-plated, too, for extra corniness.
He pointed the Glock at Dev.
A moment later, he was holding only the grip of a pistol. The barrel, just forward of the trigger guard, had been lopped cleanly off. An unfired bullet tumbled out of the breech.
Batface registered shock and dismay. “Oh, man. That thing cost a buttload.”
“And now get a load of its butt,” said Dev as he snatched the rear half of the gun out of Batface’s grasp with his free hand and clubbed him on the head with it.
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