Banerjee took a moment before making up his mind and accepting the gun off Dev. “Very well. I’ve next to no experience with firearms but I’m sure I’ll manage.”
“Right, then,” Dev said. “Wagons roll.”
The group of five men slipped through the barricade and re-entered Lidenbrock City.
30
“WHAT DID TED Jones do next?” Dev asked Banerjee.
“He – we – embarked on an exploration of the moleworms’ nesting grounds. This meant going deep down, dangerously deep. I would never normally have dared venture so far into the subterranean world, but Ted insisted, and what could I do but go along? We travelled light, carrying all we needed in backpacks – provisions, mostly. We descended slowly and carefully, acclimatising ourselves to the increasing heat. Potable water was our most precious resource, and we used closed-loop filtration bottles to keep ourselves hydrated.”
“You drank your own purified pee.”
“We recycled our urine, yes. What of it? It’s not so terrible. You get used to the taste.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to try it myself, if at all possible.”
“Moleworms, as you may be aware, keep their lairs in regions close to the mantle, where a human couldn’t survive for long,” said Banerjee. “They’re known to build nests higher up, however, in slightly cooler regions, for the purposes of giving birth and rearing their young. Ted and I surveyed a number of the breeding colonies. Eventually we zeroed in on a single nest where the parents seemed less than typically attentive.”
They passed the chained-up albino dog. Again it set up a ferocious barking, and this time the owner came out to see what was bothering it. When the animal wouldn’t respond to his demands for silence, he kicked it until it got the message. Then he fixed a bleary eye on Dev and the others.
“Who the fuck’re you people?” he mumbled, rummaging with one hand in the front of his pyjama bottoms, scratching his bare chest with the other. “Heard some gunfire back that-a-way just now. Anything to do with you?”
“None of your business,” said Stegman. “Go back inside.”
The dog owner flipped him a finger, gave the dog another kick for good measure, and shuffled back into his habitat, yawning hard.
“They had a brood of three,” Banerjee continued. “Two males and a female. They were neglectful parents. Usually one of a mating pair stays with the pups while the other is out hunting, but in this case both mother and father were happy to go off for hours at a time and leave their offspring to fend for themselves.”
“Jones kidnapped one, didn’t he?”
“I was dead set against the idea, but I was still under his sway. He talked me round. It went against everything I believed in, the whole ethos of zoology, which is to observe and make notes but never interfere. My desire to please Ted, though, was stronger than my scruples. We stole one of the males. His siblings tried to prevent us. They were only recently born, a few days old. Big as foxes, and as innately vicious. Ted shot them both dead. We carried off the male pup – sedated – and left the area as quickly as we could.”
“Didn’t the parents follow you?” Trundell asked. “They’d have been able to track the pup’s scent.”
“Ted thought of that. He poisoned the corpses of the other two pups, injecting them with a fast-acting lethal neurotoxin. The first thing the parent moleworms would have done when they returned to the nest would be eat the remains. Moleworms never turn up the opportunity of a free meal, even if it’s the corpses of their own children.”
Trundell made an appalled face. “That’s barbaric.”
“The eating-their-dead-kids or the poisoning?” said Dev.
“The poisoning, obviously.”
“Okay, thought so. Just checking where your values are at.”
“And you were complicit in it, professor,” Trundell said bitterly to Banerjee.
“Now you can understand my remorse,” Banerjee replied. “I violated a code of practice I had lived by all my life. At any rate, we escaped with the pup – and with our lives – and made our way back up to the environs of Lidenbrock. Ted returned to the city itself, leaving me with the task of hand-rearing the pup. That’s what I did – all I did – for the next year.”
“You brought up a baby moleworm,” Dev said.
“I kidded myself that it was a useful experiment, that I was learning at first hand about a moleworm’s very earliest stages of development. Really I was just doing Ted’s bidding. I caught scroaches and fed them to the pup in chunks.”
Trundell glowered at him again, but Banerjee seemed oblivious.
“Blindwarblers, too,” he said, “which he got a real taste for. I became a kind of wet nurse, forever filling his voracious, gaping maw. During the initial months it was a round-the-clock job. Feeding time was every four hours. It exhausted me.”
“On your own? Ted didn’t help?”
“He came by now and then to assess the pup’s progress. He brought me supplies when I ran low. For the most part, he left me to it, though.”
“Ever occur to you to ask what he wanted a moleworm for?”
“Often, and I did enquire, but always the answer was the same: ‘Never you mind.’ And Ted would look at me in a certain way, as if reminding me of the loyalty I felt for him, the debt I owed him. I quailed each time. Vividly I would recall how he had saved me and my family on numerous occasions. These were like actual memories of real events. They were all piled on top of one another, countless variations on a theme. I couldn’t separate them out, one from the next. They had all happened, as though I had led the most cursed, tragedy-filled life imagin –”
“Shh.”
Zagat, who had taken point, raised a hand. Everyone halted in their tracks.
They had come to a six-way crossroads. Catwalks lined a shaft that rose hundreds of metres overhead and bored an even greater distance downward. Footfalls and voices could be heard from the tunnel street to the left.
Zagat patted the air to indicate that the others should shrink back, making themselves unobtrusive. Dev tiptoed forward to join him at the junction. Together, he and Zagat peered surreptitiously round the corner.
A dozen Lidenbrockers were ambling towards them. They were young, none older than twenty. Old enough to be members of a gang, but were they Kobolds?
They joshed and bantered. As they reached the catwalk, one of the boys seized one of the girls from behind and pretended he was going to tip her over the handrail. She retaliated by slapping him in the groin, hard enough to elicit a torrent of anguished swearing. The rest all laughed. Horseplay.
The kids turned left, going off along the far tunnel.
“False alarm,” Dev informed Stegman, Trundell and Banerjee. “Not Kobolds. At least not as far as I can tell. A couple of them had tattoos, but I didn’t see any body modification.”
“With Lidenbrock gangs, it isn’t just about dress codes or insignia or suchlike,” said Banerjee. “They use commplant handshakes and proximity sensing. Their commplants beam out affiliation signals. That way, you can recognise another member of your own gang even if you don’t know the person by sight.”
“That’ll come in handy during a rumble. Help sort out friend from foe.” Dev pondered. “Hmm. Wonder if it’s possible to hack into their insite node and falsify affiliation signals for us so that we can pass ourselves off as Kobolds.”
“They’re well-encrypted, as I understand it. Do you have the programming skills?”
“Not me, but someone at ISS central office would. All I’d need would be a software patch from them. Trouble is, it’d take a couple of hours at least to arrive, and, as Sergeant Stegman is no doubt itching to point out, we don’t have that much time.”
“We certainly don’t,” said Stegman.
“Then on we go, as we are,” said Dev. “Which way, prof?”
Banerjee pointed right, and they padded round a section of catwalk and down the tunnel indicated.
“So,�
� Dev said, “you had your baby moleworm. You and Ted were his proud stepdads. How long did you keep him?”
“By year’s end, the pup was almost fully mature,” said Banerjee. “We’d stowed him in a small, narrow cave, a natural channel. It was a long-defunct lava tube, I believe. We’d bricked up the opening and installed a gate for us to go in and out through. The moleworm was chained up inside, and more or less docile. I would regularly sedate him and file down his claws so that he couldn’t dig his way out.”
“You’d tamed him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. He was still a wild beast. But he had come to associate me with the bringing of food, and so he accepted my presence, tolerated me. I nevertheless made sure not to get too close to him. The larger he grew, the less predictable his moods were. A couple of times he made a lunge for me. Had I been slightly nearer, a fraction slower in reacting, who knows? I mightn’t be here to tell the tale.”
He sounded wistful, as though becoming dinner for his pet moleworm might have been preferable to living.
“It would have been poetic justice, at least,” he said. “A kind of bleak, fitting irony. Then the day came when Ted determined that the moleworm was ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“That I don’t know. Ted simply arrived and announced that he was taking him off my hands. He brought equipment with him.”
“What sort?”
“Can’t say for sure. Some of it looked medical, some technological. Hypodermics, phials of serum, a laser scalpel, electronic hardware. He told me my work was done and I should go. I think I may have protested, I’m not sure. If I did, it wasn’t strenuously. My lord and master had dismissed me. I went.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m surprised he didn’t kill you. You’d outlived your usefulness. Plussers don’t tend to be sentimental when it comes to humans. We’re a lower life form to them, all equally ugly and expendable.”
“I’ve wondered about that myself,” said Banerjee. “My assumption is he no longer considered me of any value at all, not even worth the trouble of killing. He’d got from me everything he required. I was superfluous after that, like the carton a takeaway meal comes in.”
“Still, you were a loose end, and loose ends need to be tied up.”
“He knew me. He knew that I would never be able to bring myself to tell anyone what I’d done, and also that I couldn’t go back to my old life. He had compromised me in every way – personally, professionally. Perhaps he got a thrill out of knowing that I was destroyed. Letting me live was crueller than ending my misery.”
“Actually, I can believe a Plusser would do that,” said Dev. “Everything I’ve heard about this Ted Jones tells me it would have given him a big digimentalist boner treating you like dirt and then cutting you loose. Plussers hate us that much. Our fleshy bodies are that offensive to them. Our lack of religious faith, too. Anything they can do to show how much contempt they have for us...”
“I never saw him again. There’ve been times, since, when I wished he had simply killed me. Times when I contemplated doing the job myself. As his influence on me started to fade, I realised how I had been duped. Without Ted around any more to keep reinforcing his power over me, the brainwashing gradually wore off. I figured out who – what – he really was. I understood how he had made me betray not just my principles but also, in some way I could not determine, my own race. Finally I plucked up my courage and went back to where we were keeping the moleworm, to confront him.”
“But...?”
“He wasn’t there. Nor was the moleworm. The bricked-up end of the lava tube had been breached. The tube was empty.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A few weeks, I think. Perhaps three or four months.”
“You can’t be more specific?”
“I’ve found it hard keeping track of time. Days have blurred. Until you told me it’s been two years since I meant to leave Alighieri, I had no idea it had been quite that long. I’d had an inkling, but I was far from sure. Ah. Almost there.”
Banerjee gave a forwards inclination of the head.
“That’s the bar where he and I met.”
It was three standard habitat cubes shoved together and knocked through to make a single large venue. Plastic tables and chairs were set out in front, haphazardly. It had once, in happier days, been called The Hobbit’s Hole. This name had been whitewashed over, however, and replaced by Underworld.
“‘A fight every night,’” said Banerjee. “That should be its motto. I was always at pains not to spill anyone’s drink, on the rare occasions I went there.”
Morning had only just broken. The ambient lighting was sputtering towards brightness. Yet already there was a queue of Lidenbrockers outside the bar waiting for it to open.
“Now, Ted’s house isn’t far.” Banerjee glanced around, orienting himself. “Down that street, I believe. Then right at the next junction, and there we are. Or is it left? No, right.”
“You don’t sound sure,” Dev said.
“When we went there that night, it was darker than this.”
“You never came here again?”
“No. It was only that one time, when he took me prisoner and... You know. Did what he did. But I’m certain of the route.”
They set off once more, and within minutes they were in sight of the habitat the Plusser had been renting. Dev cautioned Banerjee and Trundell to hold back.
“Stegman, you keep an eye on them, okay? Zagat, with me.”
Stealthily, guns drawn, Dev and the big policeman approached the front door.
“Be ready for anything,” Dev whispered. “Even if Ted Jones isn’t home, the place could be booby-trapped.”
Zagat grunted assent.
Dev put his ear to the door and listened. He could hear nothing. He motioned to Zagat to check the windows. Zagat did so and shook his head.
“Blinds,” he said, miming drawing a cord.
Dev debated. There was every chance the Plusser was elsewhere, long gone, and the house was empty. That didn’t mean, though, that he might not have left a nasty surprise behind for anyone who tried to break in.
He tested the door handle; it turned smoothly, and the door swung inward.
Inattention?
Or invitation?
Only one way to find out.
It was dark inside the habitat, but Dev’s Alighierian vision swiftly adapted.
The lower storey was unoccupied. It had the standard layout: open-plan living area, kitchen nook, connecting door to the bathroom. The decor was in fairly shabby condition, and most of the surfaces bore a thin fur of dust. A couple of dirty dishes lay in the sink. The air had a stale, undisturbed tang.
The habitat had been lived in, but not, it seemed, all that recently.
Dev indicated that Zagat should scope out the bathroom while he himself headed to the upper storey.
The stairs were narrow and steep. One riser creaked loudly underfoot. Dev froze. No sounds from above. No scurry of furtive activity. He reaffirmed his grip on his hiss gun and continued on up to the landing.
Two doors, both shut.
One opened onto a bedroom with a rumpled, unmade bed and a few items of clothing strewn around. Nobody here.
The other door revealed a bedroom of identical size to the first. In this one, the bed had been shunted aside against the wall, stacked on end along with nearly all the other items of furniture.
A lone, tubular-steel chair stood in the centre of the floor.
In it sat a slumped body.
Dev crept forward, gun levelled.
It was a man. His chin was sunk onto his collarbone. He appeared dead.
Peering more closely, Dev detected the tiniest of movements. The man’s chest was rising and falling, all but imperceptibly. He was breathing, but in the shallowest way possible. His nose gave a faint whistle as the air went in and out.
Dev spied an intravenous drip installed in the man’s arm. The tube led to a
machine silently dispensing a clear fluid into his bloodstream.
He was alive, but in a kind of coma or suspended animation. Physically here, mentally absent. No higher-order brain function. The machine was life support, providing him with a nutrient solution to keep him from starving.
Dev realised that he was looking at Ted Jones. Or rather, the body of Ted Jones, minus its Polis Plus occupant.
Then he realised that Ted Jones had raised his head and was looking back.
Drifty, not-quite-right eyes.
Next instant, a hand clamped round his wrist and twisted it sharply. Another hand wrested the hiss gun from his fingers.
Jones stood and pressed the barrel of the gun against Dev’s forehead.
“Dev Harmer,” he said. “The ISS consultant who’s come to foil my plans. How’s that working out for you?”
31
DEV DIDN’T BERATE himself for letting the Plusser catch him unawares. It was done. Error. Move on.
His main concern was making sure that a second or so from now, his brains weren’t decorating the wall behind him.
Surprise tactic? Two could play at that game.
He pushed his head forwards, shoving Jones’s gun arm back. At the same time he reached for the IV in the Plusser’s arm and yanked the tube out sharply and roughly.
Jones let out a guttural cry of pain, and Dev lashed a hand upwards, knocking the hiss gun out of his grasp. The weapon spiralled across the room, clattering into a corner.
Jones dived for it, but Dev shoulder-barged him. They fell together into the chair, which toppled, depositing them both flat on the floor.
Lying supine, Jones threw a punch. Dev intercepted it and unclenched the Plusser’s fist, remorselessly bending the fingers back until two of them broke at the metacarpal joint. Bellowing, Jones grabbed the chair with his other hand and swung it up and round, clobbering Dev on the side of the head.
His entire skull ringing, Dev wrestled the chair off Jones and brought it downwards onto his exposed neck so that one of the armrests crunched into his windpipe. He thrust harder, applying his bodyweight, hoping to choke the Plusser into submission.
World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Page 19