Border Princes t-2

by Dan Abnett

  ‘No,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘OK. Is it safe?’ James asked, peering at the thing suspended in the glowing field.

  ‘Eight levels of safeguard insulation,’ said Toshiko. ‘Ward screens. Focus blockers. Chastity belt.’

  ‘Good,’ said James. ‘I don’t want another mind-screw like that.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither,’ said Toshiko. ‘I’m still not thinking straight. I’ve got what my father used to call “hand-me-down head”. Nasty. Befuddled. How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ James said.

  ‘How’re the ribs?’

  ‘Fine. No heavy lifting, Owen said.’

  ‘What?’ Toshiko asked, glancing at Gwen. Gwen had involuntarily sniggered.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’ Toshiko asked again, eyeing Gwen inquisitively.

  Gwen shook her head. A memory, unbidden. James hoisting her up against his fridge-freezer in the small hours of Friday morning. Carrying her weight, lost in passion.

  ‘Nothing. Well, that thing was a real twenty-seven, wasn’t it?’ Gwen said.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ said James.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Toshiko. She made to replace her eye-guards. ‘Thanks for Saturday, by the way. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. The Andy stuff was priceless.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said James. He and Gwen walked away, leaving Toshiko to her work.

  ‘You’re never heavy lifting,’ James whispered to her.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘You left this at my place,’ he added, handing over her MP3 player.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Thanks.’

  ‘New listings,’ he said as he walked away.

  Gwen put her right earpiece in, and selected menu. Music began. He’d loaded ‘Coming Up For Air’ and eight other tracks by Torn Curtain, his favourite band. ‘Coming Up For Air’ had been playing during the fridge-freezer moment.

  ‘Heads up.’

  Jack appeared on the walkway above the work areas. ‘Morning, all. I trust you’ve had your coffee. Busy week. James, can you get onto your source in the Land Registry and background check that commune in Rhondda? It could be nothing, but I’ve got an itch says it’s a cult, and that web page you found doesn’t fill me with confidence that it’s entirely, you know, terrestrial?’

  ‘On it,’ James said.

  ‘Good. Owen?’

  Owen swung around on his chair. ‘Still nothing on the missing pets in Cathays. I’m cross-referencing a police report of small bones found in a skip behind a youth club. Weevil-watch is clean for the last week. Oh, and the flying saucer seen over Barry turned out to be an escaped windsock. I’m also keeping tabs on that man in Fairwater who rang the Samaritans and told them a Baycar bus had eaten his wife. I think it’s a Care in the Community issue, but you never know.’

  ‘You never do,’ Jack agreed. ‘And the Mr and Mrs Peeters thing?’

  ‘I’m still watching that one,’ Owen said. ‘You’ll know as soon as I do.’

  ‘If they start hatching, I’ll want to know before you know,’ Jack said. ‘Tosh?’

  ‘Still busy analysing the Amok,’ Toshiko replied.

  ‘Yeah, well, skip that for now. I’ve sent a file to your station. Check it out. Either I’m wrong — and please God, I am — or an auto mechanic in Grangetown is blogging on how to make a portable meson gun. In Sumarian.’

  ‘I’ll look into that.’

  ‘Would you?’ Jack looked around. ‘Gwen?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Got a minute?’

  Gwen walked into his office. Jack had newspapers spread out on his desk.

  ‘Did we make the front page, then?’ she asked.

  Jack shook his head. ‘Best we got was two inches on page eighteen.’

  ‘So, that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s good. Everybody caught up in The Amok Incident was too damaged to remember anything coherent.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of good.’

  ‘Best we could hope for.’

  Gwen waited. Then she said, ‘I think I’d better apologise.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I was harsh, on Thursday. Really very harsh. I’m sorry.’

  Jack sat back and sighed. ‘No, you’re all right. I should apologise. I was out of line. I didn’t realise how … how insidious the Amok was. I think it affected me more than I knew. Made me act-’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s not OK. It deserves an apology,’ Jack said.

  ‘Accepted.’

  Jack nodded. ‘We friends again, Gwen Cooper?’

  ‘Always were.’

  He nodded again. ‘You have a good weekend?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hang out with the others?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. There was no point lying.

  Jack stood up. ‘Andy Pinkus, Rhamphorhynchus. The lost season. As good as James claimed?’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’ How did he know?

  ‘I know everything, Gwen,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe I could borrow the disks sometime. I do like Andy. Smart-funny, like Ren and Stimpy, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, let’s get to work,’ Jack said.

  ‘The Amok,’ Gwen said. ‘Do you know what it was?’

  ‘That? Oh, yeah,’ Jack replied.

  He flipped over one of the newspapers on his desk and tapped a finger on the back-page word search.

  ‘A puzzle?’ James said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We were nearly killed by a word search?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Kinda.’

  ‘People died because of a word search?’ Toshiko asked.

  ‘OK,’ Jack said, ‘hurry up and get over that part. I was making an analogy. A Jamesian analogy. The Amok is a puzzle, a mental exercise. Like a crossword or — yes — a word search. Trouble is, it was built by and for a species who exist in more dimensions than we do. Their idea of a simple puzzle invaded our minds in ways we couldn’t cope with. We weren’t made for logic challenges on that scale. We are simple, sturdy, four-dimensional beings. An eleven-dimensional sudoku is going to be a bit of a head-melt to the likes of us. Addictive, inviting, perplexing, infuriating, involving… but beyond our feeble means to solve.’

  ‘You’re saying I was mullahed by a sudoku?’ Owen asked, joining them.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘What news?’

  ‘This just in. The Peeters are hatching,’ Owen said.

  ‘Damn! Fighter Command!’ said James.

  ‘Exactly. Let’s roll,’ said Jack.

  SEVEN

  The alley beside the Mughal Dynasty smelled of exhaust fumes and cooked garlic on a Monday morning. The sky was spitting gobs of rain and, from outside the restaurant, Shiznay could hear the shouts of the delivery driver from the meat packers.

  She was wearing a jogging suit, her hair tied back, and was lugging four tied-up sacks full of kitchen waste from the Sunday buffet (‘two for the price of one!’).

  Shiznay opened the lid of the galvanised dumpster. She heard a scurrying, a settling, and braced herself for the rats that often popped up out of the slurry. Kamil ought to have been doing this drudge work, but Kamil had been out with his mates the previous night, and had greeted their mother’s calls with groans and rebukes. ‘Shiz, Shizzy, be my good daughter and take out the rubbish.’

  And she was, always, a good daughter.

  She threw the bags of rubbish into the dumpster, swinging from the waist. She heard a stirring, and looked for something to flip the lid shut without having to get too close.

  The noise wasn’t a rat. It was coming from behind the dumpster.

  Mr Dine unfolded himself and stood up in the light. He blinked at Shiznay.

  She stared at him. ‘You,’ she said, ‘should go away.’

  ‘Shiznay,’ he said, focusing on her. ‘I… I’m sorry, I-’

  ‘You should go away, right now! You’re not welcome here!’

  Mr Dine breathed in and exhale
d slowly.

  ‘Were you… sleeping behind there?’ she asked. ‘Did you sleep there last night?’

  He shrugged. ‘I crashed.’

  She said nothing, just stared at him.

  He looked back. ‘I wanted to come back, Shiznay. To apologise. Is your father all right? I have a horrible feeling I might have hurt him the other day.’

  ‘He’s fine. But he doesn’t want to see you around here any more.’

  Dine nodded, understanding. ‘Of course. I can appreciate why he feels that way.’ He took something out of his jacket and held it out to her. ‘I left without payment transaction. I wanted to repair that error. I trust this will be adequate.’

  ‘I don’t want any trouble. Just go. Go.’

  ‘Please take this, Shiznay, and give it to your father, with my solemn apologies.’

  He stank. He’d been sleeping in the dumpster, by the smell of it. Reluctantly, she put out her hands, expecting a few crumpled notes.

  He put rocks in her hands instead. Grit, more like. She looked down. ‘What is…?’

  Diamonds. Eighteen rough-cut diamonds. Or specks of broken glass, but she was somehow sure they were actual diamonds.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked.

  ‘A customer.’

  ‘I can’t take these.’

  ‘Why not? Surely they sufficiently reimburse your restaurant for the meal I ran out on?’

  ‘I don’t know where you got them from. Are they dodgy?’

  ‘Dodgy?’

  ‘You know, shonky?’

  ‘You have used two words I don’t know.’

  ‘Dodgy? Shonky? How the hell do you not know words like that?’

  ‘I’m not from around here.’

  ‘That much is certain. Where the hell did you get a handful of diamonds? You pick them up off the street, did you?’

  He looked blank for a moment. ‘I found them in the waste unit.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘A pencil. A broken pencil. Just a stub. One of yours I think. The kind you write down orders with, certainly. It was simply a matter of graphite compression.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing illegal was done. I performed the compression manually.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It was a simple action.’

  Shiznay stared at him. ‘Were you sleeping there all night?’

  Mr Dine smiled. ‘From time to time, I am suddenly alerted to action. I usually have little warning, and the priority takes over. I am invested. I can’t argue with it. The calorific cost of alert is huge. I expend at a high level, and then crash rapidly. It usually turns out to be a false alarm.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘I know. Please accept the payment. And please pass on my abject apologies to your father. My intention was not to hurt him. Alert protocols had taken over. The Principal appeared to be in danger. I have no choice but to act when that happens.’

  ‘Mr Dine, I-’

  ‘One last thing, Shiznay. Close your eyes.’

  She closed her eyes, and heard a slight, whooshing sound. When she opened her eyes again, he had vanished. Which was, of course, impossible, given the geography of the alley.

  Unless he had gone…

  Shiznay Uhma looked up at the sky, into the sporadic rain.

  ‘Come back when you want,’ she said.

  A fine Edwardian house on a quiet residential street in Pontcanna. A black SUV, the automotive equivalent of mirror shades, sitting outside under the council-tended elms.

  This was not amateur. Gwen was quietly delighted at that part. Not so overjoyed about the mucus.

  The Droon were migratory, and sometimes came to Cardiff the way that these things did. According to conversations, operational post-mortems, Torchwood had dealt with the Droon eleven times since Jack had taken charge. Three of those occasions had been since Gwen had joined the team. They’d had practice.

  Mr and Mrs Peeters lived in that fine Edwardian house on that quiet residential road. They’d lived there for twenty-six years. Mr Peeters was a retired history teacher, and his wife still taught piano privately. The Droon lived inside Mr and Mrs Peeters. They’d lived there for eight months.

  James and Toshiko had gone around the back of the house. Gwen and Jack had approached the front door. Owen watched the side gate by the neatly maintained garage. They had brought the essential kit: audio paddles, tongs, Loctite baggies, pac-a-macs, surgical gloves, wet-wipes, tight-res scanners and carpet cleaner.

  The thing with the Droon was that they were generally harmless. On arrival, they took up residence somewhere warm and moist, like a sinus passage, and stayed there, in a kind of contented fugue state. The worst harm they ever did was to trigger mild, cold-like symptoms.

  Unless they hatched.

  Mostly, they went away again without hatching after a few months. Just went away, or simply died and were ejected, into a Kleenex or during a sneeze, without their place of residence ever knowing about it. It was unnecessarily difficult and risky to try to remove them in their fugue state: better by far, for the health of the host, to allow them go to away of their own accord.

  But, one time in ten, they pupated and advanced to the next phase of their haphazard, incomprehensible life cycle. That one time in ten required swift reaction. Fighter Command.

  Sudden elevations in alpha-wave patterns were a reliable overture to hatching. As soon as the Peeters had been identified as Droon carriers, Toshiko and Owen had snuck into their house one afternoon and wired it with pattern monitors.

  ‘Spike’s increasing,’ Owen said, checking his compact scanner. His Bluetooth carried his words to the others.

  Jack rang the bell.

  Mrs Peeters was a nice, elderly lady with a terrible head-cold. She squinted at Jack and Gwen with swollen, half-shut eyes.

  ‘We’re from the Gas Board,’ said Jack, igniting a toothy smile.

  That didn’t seem especially credible to Mrs Peeters. A pretty girl in a black bomber jacket and a matinee idol in a greatcoat, both of them wearing clear plastic pac-a-macs over the top of their outer clothes. Sniffing and rubbing her nose on a hankie, she asked to see some proper ID.

  With a simple, deft gesture, Jack showed her an audio paddle instead. By the time Mrs Peeters had realised the thing in his hand wasn’t a laminated ID, the paddle — a matt-black plastic instrument the size and shape of a flattened salad server — was pressed against her forehead and Jack had thumbed the small, red ‘on’ switch.

  Mrs Peeters took it rather well, all things considered. She let out a sharp moan, staggered backwards with her fingers pressed to her temples, and pressurised slime cannoned out of her violated nostrils.

  ‘Catch her,’ Jack advised.

  Gwen was already doing so. She secured Mrs Peeters’ falling form around the shoulders, dragged her quickly and gently into the hall, and lowered her onto the hall runner. Jack stepped inside behind them, and closed the front door.

  Mrs Peeters was effectively unconscious, but her body bucked and rocked with involuntary coughs and throaty choking noises. An impressively noxious quantity of viscous yellow mucus was flowing from her mouth and nose.

  ‘Recovery position,’ said Jack. ‘Keep her airway clear.’

  ‘Doing it,’ Gwen replied. She had rolled Mrs Peeters onto her side, and reached her fingers into the lady’s spluttering mouth, pulling out globules of mucal matter. Thank God for surgical gloves. And pac-a-macs. The blast pattern of Mrs Peeters’ first sneeze covered the front of Jack’s plastic slicker like glue.

  ‘Give her another go,’ Gwen said.

  Jack bent down and administered the paddle to Mrs Peeters’ head again. As they hatched, the Droon were especially vulnerable to infrasonic bursts.

  Mrs Peeters began to rack and cough more violently. A much more considerable flood of mucus began to pour out of her head, thick and soft like sugar icing.

  ‘Oh, that’s nasty,’ said Gwen, hard at work.<
br />
  A voice called out from somewhere. A man’s voice, calling his wife’s name between phlegmy coughs.

  ‘Tosh?’ Jack advised over his headset.

  At the back of the house, in a dew-damp garden of mature apple trees and hydrangeas, Toshiko and James started to move. James had already popped the catch on the French windows.

  The back room was a sitting room, with a handsome baby grand and antimacassars over the chair backs. An aspidistra stood on a jardinière beside a rack of sheet music. A number of school photographs hung on the walls; tiers of uniformed kids staring at the camera in landscape format.

  James and Toshiko went out into the hallway. The voice floated down from upstairs. ‘Viv? Who is it? Who’s that at the door?’

  Back down the hall, by the front door, Jack and Gwen were dealing with Mrs Peeters. The poor woman was emitting wet, splattery sneezes and gurgles.

  Without waiting for further instruction, James and Toshiko went up stairs.

  ‘Whoo! Really spiking now!’ Owen warned over the link.

  ‘Understood,’ replied James. An upper landing, with a blanket box and some framed watercolours and mezzotints of Snowdonia. A rattling, fluid cough coming from a nearby bedroom.

  Mr Peeters had taken to his bed the day before. The room smelled of menthol and cough linctus. There were two boxes of tissues beside the rumpled bed. Mr Peeters had made it to the doorway, unsteady and flushed. He was wearing flannelette pyjamas and a worried expression.

  ‘Who…?’ he began to say.

  ‘Health visitors,’ said Toshiko smoothly. ‘Your wife called us.’

  ‘Just sit back down on the bed, Mr Peeters,’ said James, ‘you ought not to be walking around.’

  Mr Peeters was too poorly to argue. He allowed himself to be manoeuvred back onto the bed. He was still confused, flu-stupid. He sneezed, and snot hung from his left nostril like an icicle.

  Toshiko helped him wipe with a tissue.

  ‘Why are you wearing plastic macs?’ the elderly man asked.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘Just going to take your temperature, Mr Peeters,’ said James, producing an audio paddle.

  ‘There we go,’ said Jack. Gwen had already spotted it in the pooling mucus. A wriggling blob, pale blue and sickly, about the size of a cockroach. Jack fished in with the stainless steel tongs, grabbed the blob out of the jellied goo and bagged it.