“But they’re not designed for that purpose, and miners have never used them for that purpose. You’re asking us to retask the tools of our trade and turn them into moleworm-killing machines. That’s like asking chefs to start throwing their carving knives at tigers.”
“As I’m sure any chef would, if the tiger was about to attack him, kill all his staff and ransack his kitchen. Or would you rather see Calder’s Edge destroyed and pit folk obliged to seek employment elsewhere? Assuming they survive, that is.”
“No,” said Thorne. “Of course not. It’s just...”
“I’m willing to give it a try,” said Konstantinov. “I’m reasonably certain I can clear it with the board of directors. And if not,” he added with a bold set of his jaw, “then I’m willing to face dismissal for going against their wishes. Mr Harmer makes a good case. We must fight back with whatever is at our disposal.”
“Easy for you to say, Konstantinov,” said Thorne. “You won’t be the one risking life and limb battling the moleworms. It’s us workers who will.”
“‘Us workers who will,’” Dev echoed. “Can I take that as meaning ‘Great idea, Dev, let’s do it’?”
“You can take it as meaning ‘Let me put it to the vote and see what my members say.’”
“Mention my name. That’s got to carry some weight with the FDC, after my sterling performance in the Ordeal.”
“I might do that,” said Thorne. “What’s certain is if I get the FDC on-side, other unions will follow. We’re that influential.”
“Which is why I asked you to this meeting, Thorne. You specifically. Apart from the fact that you grudgingly think I’m all right, you are the big cheese among Alighierian union leaders. The leader of leaders. You’re the one who can make this happen, and happen quickly.”
“Flattering bastard.”
“I know.”
“For the record,” said Graydon, “I’m not mad about your scheme, Harmer. Not at all. These aren’t trained combat troops we’re talking about. They’re ordinary Calder’s citizens. You’re putting them up against a horde of large, powerful predatory mammals. Some of them could die. Lots of them.”
“I’m well aware of that, Maurice. They’re not soldiers, no. But what they are is better than that. They won’t be fighting just for a day’s wages or because someone with stripes on their sleeve has ordered them to. They’ll be fighting to protect their homes, their jobs, their friends, their families, their city, their own lives. That’s the best army you can have, the one with everything to lose, the one that has a direct personal stake in winning. You can bet they’ll commit and do whatever it takes.”
“But,” said Kahlo, “we still have to get the moleworms to show themselves. So far they haven’t. It’s all been stealth attacks. Like you said earlier, Harmer, the entire planetary crust is their jungle. We can’t go chasing after them and hunting them down. It’d be hopeless.”
“No,” said Dev. “You’re right. So we have to change the game. Draw them out. And I think I know how to do that.”
43
“YOU LOOK EXHAUSTED, Kahlo,” Dev said as Patrolman Utz drove them away from Graydon’s office.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Kahlo said. “It’s been chaos. I haven’t slept, haven’t stopped. I’m running on fumes. Only adrenaline and energy bars are keeping me going. You don’t look so hot yourself.”
“Hot? With these burns, surely that’s all I look like.”
“This irrepressible sense of humour of yours – you know it starts to wear thin after a while?”
“I recognise all the words in that sentence. I just don’t understand their meaning when they’re put together in that order.”
“Ugh,” said Kahlo, while Utz quietly sniggered.
The pod whirred through a beaten, battered, bruised Calder’s Edge. Debris from roof falls lay in unruly heaps. Column-based habitats had been shaken free from their moorings and gone tumbling to the cavern floor. Dev saw a raised rail track that was truncated abruptly in mid-air, several support pylons having collapsed along its course. A train had nosedived off the end and plunged a hundred metres onto a plaza below, where it now sat crumpled and curled like a dead snake.
Groups of people wandered through the devastated areas of the city, searching for missing loved ones. Their faces registered desolation, shock, and a kind of frantic hope.
Other groups were assembled in huddled knots, hugging, consoling one another.
Inevitably there were looters and rioters too, running rampant through the streets. Fear had sparked their basest impulses – to rob, to vandalise, to hurt others. Police were out in force to stop them, and Dev glimpsed skirmishes between law and disorder. Law, luckily, seemed to be winning.
Here and there, fires burned. Smoke billowed up to the cavern roof, gathering in a grim black pall. A priority for the emergency services was bringing the blazes under control before the cavern filled up with choking, toxic fumes.
“Hungry,” said Kahlo.
“Huh? You asking if I am, or telling me you are?”
“Both.”
“I am completely starving. But I doubt there’s anywhere to eat that’s open.”
“My place.”
“You cook?”
“No. I can do eggs, that’s about it. Interested?”
“I’m never one to turn down a free meal.”
“Utz, drop us off at West Nine Station. Then go home yourself. Grab an hour or two’s R and R. I’ll call when I need you again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In her habitat, Kahlo made scrambled eggs, adding a dash of chilli oil to give the dish savour. Dev wolfed down his helping as though he hadn’t eaten in days, washing it down with strong black coffee.
“Maybe it’s just the hunger talking,” he said when he had almost finished, “but this is the best-tasting eggs I’ve ever had. No, tell a lie. I knew a sergeant major who could rustle up a mean omelette. His trick was he never washed the frying pan. It got this kind of patina which he said enhanced the flavour. Mind you, during the war all food was good.”
“How’s that?”
“Any meal you ate meant you were still alive, so you valued it all the more.”
“You know, you still haven’t told me how you could have died at Leather Hill and yet here you are, eating eggs in my house.”
“That? Well... I probably shouldn’t. It’s covered by a non-disclosure agreement, and I could be prosecuted for leaking trade secrets.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, but what the fuck. You’re no blabbermouth. If you can’t trust a police chief...”
He set down his fork.
“It was late in the war, and a certain private security contractor was looking towards the future, to a time when either Polis Plus had been comprehensively trounced or a truce had been declared.”
“This was ISS?”
“They called themselves the Winter Consortium back then. Before the war, they’d provided armed escorts for celebrities and on-board security personnel for infraspace flights. Nothing major-league, but the company’s founder, Ulysses Winter, had ambition. Vision, some would say. He foresaw that TerCon might need a network of trained operatives to help keep the post-war peace – men and women who could be inserted quickly into potential trouble spots to help defuse powder kegs before they exploded.”
“And annoy the fuck out of local law enforcement while they’re about it.”
“That too,” said Dev. “Winter was well connected. He had extensive contacts within TerCon. He was able to secure substantial government investment, and he sank the money into research. He hired the best brainiacs he could and put them to work reverse-engineering Polis Plus technology scavenged from the battlefield. They figured out ways of growing entire clone bodies from small quantities of DNA and transferring complete consciousnesses in digitised form, just like the Plussers could.”
“Is that even legal, repurposing Plusser tech?”
“How should I know? You�
��re the cop. They did it anyway.”
“Okay, so how did you get involved?”
“I’m coming to that. Thing is, Winter was sneaky. He started recruiting for his prototype Interstellar Security Solutions before the war even ended, and he did that by pinpointing suitable candidates in advance and arranging to have their consciousnesses uploaded at the point of death. I can only assume the military top brass connived in this. Maybe bribes changed hands, who knows? At any rate, without my knowledge or say-so, I was singled out as one of those candidates.”
“You’d been decorated several times,” Kahlo said. “You had a good record. Guess that would have flagged you up to Winter.”
“Probably. Or it could just be that I was in the right place at the right time, in the right condition – near death but also close enough to a transcription matrix to be uploaded before I finally croaked. I figure Winter had ‘talent scouts’ loitering behind lines during the big campaigns, under orders to latch on to the fatally injured bodies of named individuals as and when they were medevac’ed back from the front. Whoever was at Leather Hill would have had his pick of goners to choose from. One of them just happened to be me.”
“So they... recorded your personality onto a hard drive?”
“Then zapped me off through ultraspace to ISS’s mainframe core on Earth. I don’t remember any of this clearly. Just impressions, fragments. Like something I might have dreamed.”
“And your body?”
“What’s left of it is buried on Barnesworld. Somewhere nice and green, I’m sure, hopefully with a view of rolling hills.”
“Shit,” said Kahlo with a shudder. “Not wishing to be unsympathetic, but that’s pretty creepy, isn’t it? Knowing your mortal remains are lying in the ground.”
“Tell me about it. Winter’s talent scout, his rep, whatever you like to call the guy, he also took cell samples off my mangled corpse. And that is why I’m now working for ISS.”
“How so? Wait, I get it. They’ve built you a new body. A new you. From scratch.”
“No, not yet. They’ve promised to. Host forms, however, are hideously expensive. I mean megabucks. The process takes time, energy, resources. It’s not like growing slabs of beef in a vat. If I want to be put into a brand spanking new me, I’ll have to earn it, and I earn it by carrying out missions for ISS. I store up credit with every successful outcome, according to a points system so arcane I’m not sure anyone understands it, least of all me. Once I hit the required total – one thousand points – I’ll have worked off my indenture. ISS will make a Dev Harmer host form and plonk me inside, and I get to carry on living as before.”
“That’s... Well, I’d heard stories, rumours. But...”
“The official ISS line is that all us operatives are volunteers. We’re a happy band of adventurers, ex-military personnel who’ve chosen to continue fighting the Frontier War in its secondary phase, guarding the Diaspora’s borders against Plusser incursion while our bodies lie in induced comas back on Earth. There’s some truth in that, but it’s also a whole lot more complicated. At least, it is as far as I’m concerned. I can’t speak for other ISS consultants. Maybe some of them are volunteers, for all I know, and that induced-coma thing is real.”
“You, though... You’re a slave.”
“Am I? That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. But what would you do in my shoes? When the alternatives are this or death, wouldn’t you take this? Wouldn’t anyone?”
Kahlo eyed him with wonder, and something Dev hadn’t seen before from her, at least not directed towards him: compassion.
“ISS have you over a barrel,” she said. “They know you’ll do whatever they ask, because otherwise you’ll die. They’re relying on that to keep you obedient, a good little drone. The only thing that keeps it from being slavery is the fact that you can earn your way out of it.”
Dev shrugged. “TerCon seems to think it’s legal.”
“Legal maybe – just about – but ethical?”
“Big business and ethics. Since when have those two even been on nodding terms? I’ve got a second chance at life, Kahlo. It’s not straightforward, and I’m having to fight for it, every inch of the way, but I’ve got it nonetheless, and no way am I going to let it go.”
Kahlo shoved her chair back from the table. “I don’t know whether I think you’re an idiot or a hero.”
“I’m pretty confused about it myself.”
“I hope it works out for you. I hope you get your thousand points and make it out the other side.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Correction: it’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“And you came topside looking for me.”
“Not just you. You and the whole of your team, including my men.”
“Still, if I didn’t know better, Captain Kahlo, I’d say you’d developed a soft spot for me.”
“Believe what you like. I’m going for a shower now. I stink, and I could do with a change of clothes, too.”
Kahlo crossed to the bathroom.
At the door, without looking back, she said, “Feel free to join me if you want to.”
Dev ran an eye over her muscular, curvy profile, and yes, he very much wanted to join her in the shower.
And so he did.
44
THEY GOT CLEAN, and then got dirty.
And then after that, they had another shower and got clean again, only to get dirty again in Kahlo’s bedroom.
Scrubbing, then rubbing. It was urgent and violent the first time, languid and lingering the second.
In the shower they both were standing up. In bed, Kahlo went on top, perhaps inevitably. It was a different kind of straddling from three days earlier when she and Dev were fighting in the sculpture pedestal. They were naked, for one thing. But there was a similar imperious look of triumph on Kahlo’s face, not least when she orgasmed. The grip of her thighs on Dev’s pelvis was spectacular and succulent, bringing him a few moments later to a climax so powerful his entire self seemed to shoot out of him.
Afterwards, they lay together, with the top sheet twisted around them like a giftwrap ribbon. For a time they dozed, Dev relishing the weight of Kahlo’s breasts on his chest and the moth-wing stir of her breath on his neck. It wasn’t love, it was two people finding solace and release in each other’s bodies while the world threatened to fall apart around them. But that was almost as good as love. The next best thing.
“I guess you’ve figured out by now that Graydon’s my father,” Kahlo said.
“Thorne called you two the king and princess of Calder’s Edge. That was kind of a clue.”
“Since we’re sharing confessions – and bodily fluids – I thought I should just mention it.”
“Does banging the governor’s daughter mean I’m in trouble? Is your dad going to come after me with a posse and a noose?”
“No, actually it makes you an elected official. Didn’t you know? That’s how we do things ’round these here parts.”
“You Alighierians and your quaint backwater customs. In return, I have to tell you that you have the honour of being my first.”
“Yeah, I took your host form’s virginity, didn’t I?” She ran fingernails down his belly. “I corrupted you.”
“The bad news is, at three days old I’m technically a minor.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“You’re a cradle snatcher. I’m your toy boy.”
She dug her nails in hard. “I mean it, buster. Not even remotely amusing.”
“So what did Maurice Graydon do that pissed you off so much? To the extent that you even changed your name?”
Kahlo seemed as though she was going to clam up. Her lips went rigid as bone.
Then, relenting, she said, “Okay. Here’s how it was. Graydon wasn’t around much when I was little. But don’t go thinking I’m just some girl with daddy issues and I resent not having had his full
attention while growing up. That’s bullshit. When he was home, he was good to me and my mother. We were, I guess, a happy family. He just worked hard, both as a miner and a union representative. He loved his job. Loved mining. Loved standing up for other miners and their wellbeing.”
“He’s the dedicated public service type, isn’t he? And the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.”
“It all went sour when my mother was killed. She was a miner too. She drove a driller rig; she was good at it, by all accounts. There was an accident, a malfunction. Not sure if it was a hardware or software glitch, but one of the critically damped servos failed.”
“There was an overshoot?”
“That’s it. The assistive mechanism on the drill arm didn’t respond correctly to a motion she made. The arm reached out much faster and further than she intended it to go, and it tore her own arm off at the socket.”
Dev made an appalled face. “I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“I thought you were going to make some crass, inappropriate comment there.”
“I’m not that insensitive. Presumably help didn’t get to her in time.”
“She was in one of the remoter tunnels, digging out a new seam. A couple of co-workers tried to save her, but she bled out. It was a brand of rig, TechnoCorp, that was notorious for faults. Uncontrolled oscillation. Failure to detect unsafe or invalid user motions. Joint fouling.”
“I remember. The company went bust eventually. Lawsuits galore.”
“Too late for my ma. This happened at the start of the Frontier War, when manufacturers like TechnoCorp were diversifying into munitions and tanks. They were overstretched, and their quality control plummeted. Some of their product didn’t meet basic safety requirements. They blamed my mother for her death, of course.”
“Driver error.”
“Exactly. They denied their rigs had problems, even though everyone knew they did. My dad waged a publicity campaign against them. He would have taken them to court, but...”
World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Page 27