World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01)

by James Lovegrove

  “I don’t care how it works, Harmer. I have no interest in that. All I care is that he violated me. He intruded on my brain and filled it with nightmares, nightmares seemingly without end. And by that method he broke me.”

  “That’s dreadful,” said Trundell.

  “Don’t take it so hard, prof,” said Dev. “During the war, Plusser interrogators cracked captive soldiers in next to no time, using the same technique. I’ve heard of marines, toughest of the tough, who were reduced to blubbering babies. You can’t be trained to resist it. No amount of conditioning can prepare you for having your own mind turned against you.”

  “The truly shaming part,” said Banerjee, “was that Ted himself featured in the dreams. He was cast as the hero. Many times he came to my rescue. When, say, bloodthirsty thugs were menacing my children and there was nothing I could do, in ran Ted like the lead actor in a movie. He would slay the evildoers and liberate their victims, earning my fawning gratitude in the process.”

  “It’s known as trauma-bonding sympathetic transference.”

  “Again, I don’t care. Call it whatever you like. Amid all the horrors I was experiencing, Ted stood out like a beacon of hope. He shone before me. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t the person responsible for my torment. He was helping me. He was my salvation. I don’t know how long it lasted, but by the end, when it was finally over, I loved him. He was my brother, my best friend, my teacher, my leader. I would have done anything for him, anything he asked.”

  “And you did, obviously,” said Dev. “What did he want?”

  “To begin with, access to my data about moleworms. It seemed an inconsequential request. Hadn’t I just gone public with that? Transmitted my paper? I could see no harm in allowing Ted to have a look at it, even though he wasn’t an academic peer or, to my knowledge, in any way zoologically qualified. He pronounced it fascinating.”

  “It is,” Trundell said encouragingly. Dev could see how crestfallen the xeno-entomologist was. Banerjee was someone he had looked up to and longed to meet. And now, in the flesh, the man was at a depressingly low ebb, filled with remorse and self-loathing. “It’s held in the highest regard in our circles.”

  “Thank you,” said Banerjee feebly. “That’s something, I suppose. Having digested the content of the paper, Ted then made me show him moleworms in situ. We visited all of my hides, many times. We logged the creatures’ comings and goings, their pack affiliations and pair bondings, how they communicate. He was acquainting himself with their behaviour patterns, and I was assisting him. I did it with enthusiasm. I was Ted Jones’s thrall. I was under his spell. He controlled me utterly. His wish was my command.”

  “Look, hate to interrupt,” said Stegman, “but is this going to take much longer? We’re on the clock, remember.”

  “Stow it, Stegman,” said Dev. “We’re not in any immediate danger. Let the professor talk.”

  “It’s not immediate danger I’m worried about. It’s the danger we’re likely to come across further down the line if we don’t head back soon. The longer we stand around here yakking, the more Kobolds there’ll be out on the streets.”

  “Kobolds?” said Banerjee. “They’re never good news. Are they after you? Then you’re in dire trouble.”

  “Yeah, I think we know that,” said Dev. “What if we get moving, then, huh? You come with us, prof, and you can fill us in on the rest of the story along the way.”

  “No.”

  “Pardon? I’m sorry, I could have sworn you just said ‘no.’”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Banerjee. “I’ve done so much that’s wrong. I’ve betrayed my most cherished principles. I’m here now, in these miserable tunnels, and I’m staying. I don’t deserve better than this.”

  “You’re happy to hang out in that hide of yours for the rest of your days? That shitty little dump? Eating birds that eat ants that eat turds?”

  “It’s where I belong. It’s my life. I can’t go back to Earth. I have no place in civilised society. Not after what I’ve been a party to, the crimes I’ve committed.”

  “All right, we get it,” said Dev. “You’ve been a bad boy. You screwed up. You’re scum. So you’ve put on a hair shirt and it’s itching nicely. Wallowing in your misery makes you feel better. Hooray. But you can’t keep it up forever. Haven’t you, you know, paid the price yet? Done your penance? Besides, this Plusser, ‘Ted Jones,’ whatever he got you to do for him, it wasn’t your fault. You were hypnexed. Brainwashed.”

  “I realise that. But it doesn’t change what I did. I gave him what he needed, the key to his goals. Willingly.”

  “No. You thought you were doing it willingly. You weren’t. All this time you’ve been punishing yourself, but he tricked you. He wasn’t even a person, prof. He was a digital entity slotted into a purpose-built meat puppet. Ted Jones wasn’t real. He was a fictitious character, a charade. A Plusser passing himself off as human. You need to get your head around that.”

  “Absolve yourself of guilt, Professor Banerjee,” Trundell urged. “Forgive yourself. Give yourself a break.”

  “Give me a break,” Stegman muttered under his breath.

  “Come with us,” said Dev. “We’ll fly you to Calder’s. I can get ISS to take you in. You’ll get a full processing and debriefing. They’ll unpick the hypnagogic exposure, get rid of any last lingering effects, rinse you all out. Like a spring-clean for your brain. You can return to your post at Harvard.”

  “They’ll never have me back.”

  “They might,” said Trundell. “They should. I’ll vouch for you.”

  “You can see your family again,” said Dev. “Pick up where you left off.”

  “They think I’m dead. Let them mourn. Let them move on and enjoy their lives without me.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dev snapped. “Enough of the pity party. We can fix this, prof. We can undo whatever it is you’ve done. Come along. We’re heading back into Lidenbrock, with you, and you can take us to find Ted Jones.”

  “What?” said Stegman. “We’re going to the arcjet, aren’t we?”

  “With a detour to Ted Jones’s place first. I’m sure Banerjee still remembers where it is.”

  “I think so,” said the moleworm expert. “I doubt he’ll be there, though. I haven’t seen him in a long while.”

  “Either he is or he isn’t. But as long as there’s a chance he is, we can’t pass it up. So let’s make tracks. Professor?”

  Banerjee wavered, casting a glance at the guano-splattered hide that had become his home, then down at the net bag containing the broken-necked blindwarblers that had become his staple diet.

  “I’m not actually giving you a choice,” Dev said. “I’m evicting you from that damn hide. I’ll set fire to it if I have to. You need to help me out, and you need to do that by taking me to Ted Jones. Who knows, you may get the opportunity to watch me seriously fuck him up. Wouldn’t that be worth the trip?”

  Numbly, but with a faint glimmer of cheer, Banerjee nodded.

  “And while we’re walking, keep talking.”

  29

  AS THEY MADE their way towards the barricade, Banerjee said, “We weren’t just studying the moleworms. Ted declared his intention to trap one, too. I advised against. I said it was foolhardy in the extreme, a recipe for getting yourself killed. I didn’t want my wonderful friend Ted to die. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I would rather have lost a member of my own family than him. Ridiculous! But that was how I felt.”

  “Did he manage it?” Dev said.

  “Trapping one? Yes, he did. I helped, of course. We put a couple of my hides to use, taking them apart and reconfiguring the panels to make a kind of large bottomless cage. We tethered a scroach as bait and prodded it with a shock stick to make it hiss. Nothing like the hissing of a scroach in distress to bring a moleworm running. It’s better than any dinner bell.”

  Trundell turned and glowered at Banerjee. “That was a bit mean.”

  “Plea
se let’s not get carried away,” the zoologist said. “A scroach is just an insect. Not one of the higher orders of creature. Its brain is barely bigger than a mushroom.”

  “Even so. They’re not yours to torture.”

  “Well, we can discuss the rights and wrongs of that another time. With the scroach properly agitated and making its displeasure loudly known, we raised the cage above it with a rope and pulley and waited for a moleworm to come along. One did – a male eastern. Rather an elderly chap. As he grabbed the scroach and started eating, we dropped the cage.”

  “I’ve seen moleworms in action,” said Dev. “No way can a cage like you’re describing hold one. Not for long.”

  “Ah, that was the beauty of it. We’d drugged the scroach, you see. Pumped it full of tranquillisers. The moleworm only had to swallow a few mouthfuls, and he became slow and lethargic. Also, we’d designed the cage so that it pinned the moleworm down. Imagine it as a tortoise’s shell, with gaps at the base for the limbs and head. Once it was in place, the moleworm couldn’t gain leverage to shake it off. Nor could he burrow down to escape.”

  “And he was doped up to the eyeballs anyway.”

  “Correct. He did his best to wriggle out of the trap, but in vain. It was touch and go, but in the end he acquiesced. He lay there immobilised, snorting, nasotentacles rippling feebly – a proud beast humbled.”

  “What did Ted Jones do with him?”

  “He had me take samples. Blood. Skin. Even saliva. Then we let the moleworm go free.”

  “Samples...”

  Dev’s theory about the moleworms was starting to gain weight.

  Organic re-creation.

  A Plusser with fresh DNA from a live moleworm could do all sorts of things. He could mimic the sequencing. Tinker with it. Build his own moleworm from scratch, if he had the laboratory resources.

  The Plussers had used organic re-creation during the war. There were their zombie clone battalions – fleshly footsoldiers who acted as cannon fodder, temporarily inhabited by Plusser sentiences. There were also instances when large, vicious predatory animals had been genetically enhanced, fitted with control implants and used as shock troops: giant lizards, smilodons with patches of leathery armour plating, the gargantuan praying mantises found on Groombridge 1830 E.

  Using native fauna as weapons was more a psychological tactic than anything. The animals succumbed to gunfire far more easily than mechs, and would sometimes resist the control implants and run away from battle instead of into it. They were inefficient and unreliable.

  There was something unnerving, nonetheless, about a planet’s wildlife rising up against you and attacking in quantity. It was as though the planet itself hated you.

  Dev could recall only too well being on the receiving end of an assault by a pack of coyote-like caniforms on Epsilon Indi A, better known as Shamo. It was a planet whose landmasses were mostly given over to desert, bathed in bronze light from its orange-dwarf sun.

  The caniforms had invaded the encampment at night, breaching the perimeter fence and rampaging between the pop-up shelters. They weren’t much bigger than golden retrievers, but there were hundreds of them, and their ferocity was terrible. They had a berserker’s immunity to pain and damage. It could take as many as ten shots to bring one down.

  Tests conducted later showed that the caniforms were all in fact replicated from a single DNA specimen. Polis+ had mass-produced them and turned them loose. Casualties had been low, but for days afterwards, talk at the camp was about nothing other than the attack. Some soldiers took fangs from the caniforms’ corpses to wear round their necks as trophies. Others said they wouldn’t be able to look at the family mutt in the same way again.

  Dev, for his part, would never forget the creatures’ cries. They had howled in more or less perfect unison, a rising-falling sound like an air raid siren emanating from a thousand throats at once. He knew that Polis+ must have orchestrated that too, in the realisation that it would raise the hackles of anyone who heard it.

  If Plussers had been able to breed and manipulate caniforms on Shamo, why mightn’t one of them be able to do the same with moleworms here on Alighieri?

  He was about to make this point to Banerjee when, all at once, there was a yell from up ahead.

  “There they are! I see ’em!”

  Dev glimpsed figures at the barricade, two of them, three, worming through the gap that he and Zagat had made.

  Kobolds.

  “Let’s get them!” a different voice called out. “Mayor Major wants them alive, but he says he’s not fussy. Dead’ll do just as well.”

  Dev couldn’t help but marvel at the Kobolds’ recklessness. They could have had the drop on him and the others. They could have lain quietly in wait and sprung an ambush.

  But no, they’d shouted at the top of their lungs, giving away their position and sacrificing the element of surprise.

  Stupid barely began to cover it.

  Which didn’t mean they weren’t still a threat.

  He shunted Banerjee aside, instructing him to take cover.

  Zagat was already making a beeline for the Kobolds, moving with considerable grace and speed for someone as bulky as he was.

  Stegman stepped in front of Trundell. He was under orders to protect the xeno-entomologist, and Dev was pleased to see him taking his duties seriously.

  Dev followed Zagat’s lead, racing to confront the Kobolds. The gang members – four of them now, all told – were pulling weapons. Dev drew his hiss gun. Zagat unholstered a mosquito.

  Shots ripped the air. Projectiles gouged the tunnel walls.

  Dev sank into a crouch and, choosing his aim carefully, returned fire. A Kobold dropped to the ground.

  The rest of the Kobolds scattered, panicking. They could dish it out, but they didn’t like it coming back at them. Two of them hid among the moleworm skeletons. The third blundered straight into Zagat. It was probably the biggest mistake of his life.

  Dev fired at the other two Kobolds, who were crouching behind a moleworm ribcage. He didn’t have clear line of sight, however. The hiss gun blasted, bone chips flew, but the Kobolds were well-shielded.

  Then he noticed that his knee was resting next to one of the piles of dried moleworm dung. A few ordure ants were patrolling outside the entrance to their faecal nest. Each was a good two centimetres from abdomen tip to head, with mandibles half as long again.

  Dev smiled.

  Trying not to think too hard about what he was touching, he scooped up the dung pile with one hand and lobbed it over the ribcage like a grenade.

  It hit one of the Kobolds smack dab on the head.

  Dev felt a sharp pinch. His hand had been in contact with the dung for scarcely half a second, yet an ordure ant had still managed to rush out and clamp itself onto the ball of his thumb. The points of its mandibles dug in excruciatingly deep.

  He squashed the insect to a pulp against a rock.

  Looking up, he saw the Kobold swatting frantically at his hair and heard the man’s gasps and gags of revulsion.

  Gasps turned to screams as the ordure ants, now very angry, crawled over him in full force. They scurried onto his face, down his neck and inside his clothing.

  The single mandible bite Dev had suffered had hurt like a son of a bitch; the Kobold was being bitten by hundreds of the ants. He danced a spastic dance as though a high-voltage electric current was going through him. Blood glinted and splashed. The other Kobold didn’t make a move to help him, just backpedalled away in horror.

  Ants poured into the Kobold’s mouth, and his screams became horrid wet retches. As the insects turned their attention to his eyes, Dev looked elsewhere. The man was no longer a danger to anyone.

  Zagat finished pounding the Kobold who had run into him. The gangster’s body hung limp from his hands. Meanwhile, Stegman had managed to manoeuvre himself into a position where he had a clear shot at the fourth and last Kobold. He brought him down with his mosquito.

  A half-minute fire
fight. No casualties for Dev and his team. A good result.

  They might not be so fortunate next time, however. Not unless Dev levelled the playing field.

  “Is that all you’re carrying?” he asked the two policemen. “Non-lethal pacification weapons?”

  “We’re cops,” Stegman replied. “What do you expect? We can’t carry anything else, not without special dispensation.”

  “Yeah, well, I think under the circumstances you could do with something with a bit more stopping power. Something that gets an immediate, permanent result.”

  Two of the Kobolds were armed with MPA pistols, a third with a bullet-firing handgun, another replica, this one a Ruger 9mm. Dev gathered up the weapons, along with any spare ammunition and charge packs he could find. None of the Kobolds was in any state to object.

  “Here you go.”

  He held the guns out to Stegman and Zagat.

  “Can’t,” said Stegman. “Calder’s Edge statutes say –”

  “Are we in Calder’s? No, we are not. Policing in Lidenbrock is a whole different ballgame. It isn’t law enforcement as you know it. Take the guns.”

  Stegman was in a quandary.

  Zagat, by contrast, grabbed one of the MPA pistols decisively. He checked the charge level, weighed the gun in his hand, aligned his eye along the sights.

  “Doable,” he said.

  “A man of few words, but his actions speak volumes,” said Dev. “Stegman?”

  The sergeant hesitated a little longer.

  “Why don’t you take an MPA too, like Zagat did? You won’t be wanting the Ruger. That’s a man’s gun.”

  Stegman, predictably, grabbed the replica Ruger. “Only as a last resort,” he said.

  “How about you, Trundle?”

  Dev proffered the second MPA pistol to the xeno-entomologist, who vigorously shook his head.

  “I’d only end up shooting my own toe off,” he said. “Or one of you.”

  “Fair enough. Didn’t think you would.” Dev turned to Banerjee. “Other professor? What do you say?”