World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01)

by James Lovegrove

  He kept clubbing until Batface was down and out.

  Stegman was grappling with one of the female ‘customs officers.’ The third joints of the fingers on each of her hands were locked together by an implanted brass ridge – a permanent, irremoveable knuckleduster. Stegman was trying to control her fists so that she couldn’t land a blow.

  Dev drew his hiss gun and shot the woman in the shoulder with a pencil-thin spike of ultra-compressed air. It went straight through her deltoid and scapula like an invisible lance, sending a spray of muscle and bone shards spiralling out behind her.

  The sheer shock of the injury stopped her in her tracks. Stegman punched her out while she was stunned. He acknowledged Dev’s assist with a cursory tip of the head.

  Shots rang out, and Dev spun. Another of the Kobolds had a ballistic handgun; this one a magnetic projectile accelerator pistol. Barbed steel flechettes raked the floor at Dev’s feet.

  Dev returned fire with the hiss gun, and the Kobold panicked and bolted for cover. He kept shooting as he ran, but he was barely looking where he was aiming, just pulling the MPA pistol’s trigger wildly. One flechette took out a fellow Kobold, ripping a hole through the man’s flank.

  Amateur.

  He found refuge behind a support pillar. He leaned round and loosed off a few more flechettes in Dev’s direction.

  Dev pinned him back behind the pillar with a couple of well-placed shots. The hiss gun drilled neat holes in the concrete, but didn’t have the penetrating power to go all the way through.

  A nano-frag mine, on the other hand...

  Dev primed the disc-shaped mine and sent it skittering across the floor. It fetched up against the foot of the pillar, anchored itself with a squirt of molecular glue, and detonated.

  A small cloud of omnivorous nanites burst out and immediately began devouring everything they came into contact with, including the mine that had birthed them. They ate through floor and pillar like a swarm of submicroscopic locusts, reducing solid structures to dust in the blink of an eye.

  Dev had set the mine for three seconds’ duration. When the time elapsed, the nanites self-destructed simultaneously, becoming inert particles of dust themselves.

  Now the Kobold was cowering behind a pillar whose lower portion had been corroded away to a thin spindle, affording him no shelter. The rest of the pillar hung from the ceiling like a stalactite. Precarious and unable to bear its own weight, it crumbled and fell with an almighty crunch.

  The Kobold sprang out of the way in order to avoid being crushed...

  ...and straight into reach of Dev’s fists.

  Deputy Zagat polished off the two remaining Kobolds by pounding their heads together. He dropped them to the ground, both unconscious, and brushed his palms against each other as though they were caked in dirt.

  “Tidy,” was all he said.

  “Well, that could have gone better,” said Beauregard. When the fighting broke out, he had scuttled up the loading ramp to the safety of Milady Frog. Now he came back down, surveying the injured and insensible Kobolds littering the docking bay. “I had the situation in hand. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t hit Harvey.”

  “Me?” said Dev. “This is my fault? He wasn’t going to leave Trundle alone. They respect toughness, you said. So I got tough.”

  “For what it’s worth, I agree,” said Trundell, blinking rapidly. He looked shaken by the violence and bloodshed, but his voice had firmness. “I only wish there’d been someone like Harmer around when I was at school. Then I’d have spent less time with my head getting flushed in the toilet. And that was just the girls.”

  Dev laughed. “I think Stegman can relate.”

  “Screw you, Harmer,” said Stegman.

  “Weren’t you having lady troubles just now?” Dev indicated the Kobold with the metal knuckles. “Maybe you like your women knocking you around a bit. You work for a real ballbreaker, after all.”

  “Seriously, Harmer. Screw. You.”

  “Not that I blame you. There’s something incredibly attractive about a woman who can kick butt. You get the feeling she’d be a wildcat in the sack.”

  “I’m warning you, you keep badmouthing Captain Kahlo...”

  “I’m not; I’m complimenting her. Anyway, what’s done is done.” He gestured around the docking bay. “They started it. They got what was coming to them. Beauregard?”

  “Yes?”

  “Reckon you can clean this mess up for us?”

  “I can secure these people somewhere, yes. There’s a set of storage lockers not far from here. I can drag them and shut them inside.”

  “Great. Do that. We can’t have other Kobolds, or anyone else, stumbling onto the scene and raising the alarm.”

  “It’s not like that’s going to help you, though,” Beauregard said.

  “Isn’t it? I thought it’d buy us a few hours, which is hopefully all we’ll need.”

  “No. What you don’t understand is that Kobolds share first-hand experiences freely and continuously via commplant. It’s how they keep tabs on one another. That way, one of the gang can’t betray or rip off the rest. Anyone who did would be caught out straight away and punished. It fosters trust.”

  “Shit. You mean they’re broadcasting their activities all the time?”

  “They have iWitness spliced into their optic nerves and it’s functioning around the clock. Everything gets sent to a private insite node only Kobolds can access. The only footage that gets blocked is their intimate moments – fornicating, defecating and so on. Then response filters kick in and put up an audiovisual blackout for the duration.”

  “Nobody was fornicating just now,” Dev observed, “although I think one or two of them might have shit themselves.”

  “This little fracas,” said Beauregard, “has been recorded from a dozen different points of view and stored in the system, and you can bet the insite node will have flagged it up. Gunfire and bloodshed are automatic alert triggers.”

  “So other Kobolds may well know all about this.”

  “Afraid so,” said Beauregard with a grave nod. “If not already, then soon.”

  “And they’ll be pissed off and come running.”

  Another nod.

  Dev gave vent to an angry grunt. “Perma-linked gangsters. None of the ’pedia entries on Lidenbrock thought to mention that. I guess that means we’re on an even tighter schedule than before.”

  “What do you propose we do?” Trundell asked.

  “Quiet. I’m thinking.” Dev mimed a buffering circle with his index finger. “Okay. Those doors over there.” He pointed to the docking bay exit. “They look pretty sturdy. We bring those down, jam the lock mechanism, then nobody’s getting in here easily, right?”

  “They’re blast doors,” said Beauregard. “Same as the ones between the bay and the ejector tube. If there’s a catastrophic failure somewhere in the tube – like the topside doors break or get stuck open during daytime – the heat from above has to be kept out somehow. Otherwise it’ll burn through the launch complex like a blowtorch and maybe even spread out into the city.”

  “Two sets of doors,” said Trundell. “Sensible. Double redundancy.”

  Dev said, “So with the inner doors securely shut, Beauregard and Milady Frog should be out of reach. The Kobolds can’t get to them. Meanwhile, the rest of us go out into the city.”

  “Much appreciated,” said Beauregard. “It still doesn’t help you, though. The Kobolds know your faces. They’ll be looking for you. Once they realise you’re not here, they’ll start scouring the city. You’d be better off getting back aboard Milady Frog right now and hightailing it while you can.”

  “Yeah, but I came here to do something and I’m not leaving until it’s done. We can stay one step ahead of these Kobold doofuses. None of them are exactly rocket scientists, if this lot are anything to go by.”

  “They have numbers. I think there are as many as a thousand of them in Lidenbrock. That’s a small army. And their
leader – Mayor Major – he isn’t stupid. With him mobilising them, the Kobolds can get very organised.”

  “Luckily for us,” said Dev, “my speciality is disorganising.”

  26

  DEV, STEGMAN, ZAGAT and Trundell stole through the network of tunnels and shafts that was Lidenbrock City.

  The place did not boast open spaces like Calder’s Edge. It didn’t nestle inside pre-existing caverns. Lidenbrock City had been carved out inch by inch, passageway by passageway, sideways, up, down, growing organically to become a complex lattice of subterranean thoroughfares. It had not been constructed according to any particular plan. It had no centre, no plaza, no heart. It was a random three-dimensional sprawl.

  The streets were lined with prefab habitats, many with jerry-built front extensions that took up so much space there was barely room for two people to walk abreast between them. Even the vertical shafts had habitats, anchored to the sheer walls, connected by ladders and open-sided elevators.

  It was grotty and grimy and claustrophobic. The one saving grace, for Dev and company, was that it wasn’t too busy – thus far, at least. Dawn hadn’t yet come to Lidenbrock, and it was still the small hours. The ambient lighting was night-time low, barely a glimmer, and there weren’t many inhabitants out and about; the few that were skulked along, alone, shying away from strangers.

  Dev suspected that this state of affairs would change once word spread among the Kobolds about the altercation in the docking bay. Then things might get very hectic indeed in Lidenbrock.

  He quickly reviewed the mission objective.

  In his moleworm paper, Professor Banerjee – the late Professor Banerjee – had been good enough to set down more than just his analysis of the life cycle, reproductive habits and hunting patterns of Pseudotalpidae alighieriensis, both orientalis and occidentalis. He had also been at pains to outline his methods, recording in meticulous detail not only how he had conducted his studies and when, but where.

  In order to observe the creatures closely, he had erected hides outside the periphery of Lidenbrock at locations of high moleworm traffic. His paper gave their GPS co-ordinates and stated that he planned to leave them in place for the use of future zoologists, should any be keen to further his research sometime, and also for his own use should he ever return to Alighieri – although, in the end, he never left.

  Dev’s hope was that one of the hides might yield some clue about the mysterious decampment of eastern moleworms to Calder’s Edge and the return of western moleworms to their old stomping grounds.

  After all, Banerjee might not have included everything he had learned about moleworms in his paper. He might have discovered more about them after sending the work off to Harvard. If so, the hides were where to look for any unsubmitted data.

  What was it one of the Kobolds had said? Haven’t seen any of those fuckers round here in an age.

  So it seemed that not just a few moleworms had left Lidenbrock; they all had. It was a mass migration.

  It seemed to confirm the suspicions Dev was forming. He had a theory about the moleworms, but one that was so tentative and unformed that it was, at present, little more than a hunch.

  Banerjee’s hides, at any rate, were his best lead, the logical place to start.

  And, given that the clock was ticking and Lidenbrock would soon be teeming with vengeful Kobolds out for blood, the hides were probably the only bit of the city Dev would have a chance to explore before the situation became too dangerous and he and the others were forced to beat a hasty retreat back to Milady Frog.

  “Stinks here,” Stegman muttered. “Garbage and sweat and mildew. I feel like I need a shower.”

  Trundell tripped over what looked like a discarded bundle of laundry. It turned out to be a Lidenbrocker sleeping off a night of indulgence. He swore at Trundell, who apologised profusely, which somehow only served to make the man angrier. He rose up, spoiling for a fight.

  “I can hardly see a thing,” Trundell confided to Dev after Zagat had pacified the Lidenbrocker, returning him to a comatose state. “Wish I had my image intensification contacts. But since I lost one of them running from that moleworm, there’s no point.”

  “Stick close to me,” Dev said. In the moonglow lighting everything was plain as day to him, as it was to Stegman and Zagat.

  “This is a horrible place,” the xeno-entomologist said with a shudder. “I don’t know how Banerjee stuck it out as long as he did.”

  “Guess he loved science more than he loved his creature comforts. You hang out with scroaches, Trundle. Most people would wonder how you can do that.”

  “Fair point. This was supposed to be a utopia, though, wasn’t it? Lidenbrock. That really didn’t work out.”

  Dev had cached a few pages about Lidenbrock City on his commplant’s internal drive, for reference.

  Lidenbrock City

  Third largest conurbation on Iota Draconis C (local planetary name: Alighieri). Founded in the early ’fifties by Henri Lelouche, French-Canadian cave explorer, cultist and self-styled “secular visionary.” Name derived from that of lead character in Jules Verne’s novel Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre), first published 236 AE.

  Lelouche (11-87 PE) was a keen spelunker who made a name for himself in caver circles charting the deep reaches of the Mulu Caves in Borneo. Lelouche came to believe that underground living was more natural for humans than overground. He claimed a subterranean environment was conducive to contentment and social cohesion. “We were once cavemen,” he said, “and if we are ever to find happiness and harmony, it is to the dark of the cave that we must return.”

  His theory was that the world’s rocky interior is a kind of womb whose safe embrace people have left behind. The surface of the planet is a harsh, cruel place where lies and deceit flourish. “Truth is below” was Lelouche’s motto.

  His Speleophilia movement was unpopular in the newly dogma-free atmosphere of Post-Enlightenment, and Lelouche came in for much personal criticism for the podcasts and prolific vlogging through which he expounded his views. Yet he managed to attract a coterie of likeminded individuals around him, among them a wealthy sibling couple, Dan and Jan Robeson of the Robeson family philanthrophic trust, whom he eventually prevailed upon to finance the establishment of a Speleophile colony in the outer reaches of the Diaspora.

  Initial excavation for what was to become Lidenbrock City commenced in 53 PE, and the city’s charter of incorporation was filed and approved by TerCon in 55. Since then...

  Since then, over the course of half a century, Lidenbrock had grown dramatically. Its population, originally a couple of hundred, now verged on a hundred thousand. The handful of Speleophiles who had supported Henri Lelouche in his dream to create an ideal, self-sustaining subterranean community had been swamped by an influx of others, scarcely any of whom shared their beliefs and aspirations.

  Lidenbrock had become a Mecca for the disenfranchised, the anti-authoritarian, the secessionist. It had gained a reputation as a place where anything went and there was minimal interference from government. Escaped and former convicts flocked there, and paramilitary extremists, and radical reactionaries, all adding to the city’s stew of lawlessness and gang culture.

  Ironically – or perhaps not – Lelouche had been killed during a shootout between rival gangs, a skirmish in a long-running turf war. Casting himself in the role of peacemaker, he had waded into the thick of the hostilities and demanded a ceasefire. He had been gunned down mercilessly by both sides.

  Lelouche had lived to see his haven for Speleophiles degenerate into a den of violence and depravity. It was possible that his attempt to end the conflict between rival factions had in fact been suicide.

  “I don’t know,” Dev said to Trundell. “A lick of paint, maybe a park bench or two, a kiddies’ playground – it could be lovely.”

  “That was another joke, was it? You’d need more than park benches to improve this dump.”

  “Tough crowd,
” Dev murmured.

  His commplant pinged. They were within a couple of kilometres of the nearest of Banerjee’s hides.

  Habitats were fewer in number here, scattered. The tunnels were narrower, with lower ceilings. Detritus lay in heaps, as though trash kept getting shoved further and further outward to the city’s edges where there weren’t as many people around to see it.

  The city outskirts. The badlands.

  An albino dog on a chain barked at the four-man group as they went by: a mangy creature, skin a mass of sores, no breed and every breed. It strained at its tether, half throttling itself in its eagerness to attack. A sleep-slurred voice yelled at it from indoors – “Shurrup!” – but the dog didn’t stop barking until Dev and company were well out of sight.

  Five hundred metres to destination, Dev’s commplant said in its neutral voice.

  Dev relayed the information to the others.

  They came to a crude barricade that had been set up across the tunnel. It was built from scrap metal, sticks of old furniture and husks of waste tech, with here and there a cushion or rug plugging a gap. Spent shell casings littered the floor in front of it, alongside empty beer cans.

  On one wall someone had scrawled in spray paint:

  On another wall there were badly drawn caricatures of moleworms, all snaggle teeth and snaky nasotentacles. Several were depicted on their backs, legs in the air, crosses for eyes, riddled with bullet holes. One had a speech bubble coming from its mouth: “u r a good shot u of killd me ded.”

  “Line of control,” Dev said. “This would have been manned round the clock, back when there were moleworms to worry about. Now people have stopped bothering. See how much rust there is on those shell casings? It’s been months since anyone fired a gun here.”

  The barricade had not been well maintained. Dev and Zagat only had to heave aside a mattress, and a whole section of the ramshackle structure simply gave way. Echoes of the collapse resounded down the tunnel beyond.