“I saw something move,” Auger said suddenly, dropping her voice to a whisper.
The torch beam skittered ahead of them like a nervous animal. “Where?”
“Down the tunnel. Looked like a person, crouching against the wall.” She caught her breath, then added, “It almost looked like a child.”
“A child? Don’t be silly.”
“A child could easily have found their way down here.”
Aveling shook his head, but she could see that he was rattled. She didn’t blame him. She had not enjoyed her previous journey along this tunnel, and she certainly wasn’t enjoying this one.
“Is anyone there?” Aveling called. “Anyone from the portal? Barton—is that you?”
“It wasn’t Barton,” Auger said. “Or Skellsgard, either.”
Aveling fired off a warning shot. The muzzle of the automatic spat orange flame into darkness, the bullet crunching through rock a dozen metres ahead of them. After the report of the gun had faded, echoes marching up and down the shaft for a few tense moments, there was only silence and their own breathing.
“Damn,” Aveling said.
“You saw something?”
“I think I saw something. But maybe it was just you planting the suggestion in my head.”
“You heard something before I saw the child,” Auger pointed out.
“I thought I saw something as well,” Aveling said, sounding a good deal less sure of himself.
“Something like a child?”
“It wasn’t a child. If it was a child, then there was something badly…” But he left the remark uncompleted.
“Something’s not right here,” Auger said. She pressed him against the wall, silencing him with a hiss. “You know it.”
“We’re just seeing shadows.”
“Or something’s gone wrong. I know what I saw. I wasn’t imagining it, even if you think you were.”
He answered her with a hiss of his own, all the while aiming the muzzle of the automatic along the shaft. She noticed that his hand was shaking badly.
“So what are you saying?” he snapped.
“I’m saying we should get out of here before we walk any further into trouble.”
“Look,” Aveling said as the torchlight suddenly came to rest on something on the floor, ten or twelve metres further down the tunnel. “That’s a body.”
It was too big to be a child. “I think that might be Barton,” Auger said, with a kind of hopeless inevitability. “I think that might be Barton, and I think he might be dead.”
“Not possible,” Aveling said.
He pulled free from her grip and moved further ahead, taking the torch with him. The light bobbed down the tunnel until Aveling reached the body. He knelt and inspected the dead man, the gun still shaking in his grip.
“This is bad,” he muttered.
Auger forced herself to join him by the body. Up close, there was no doubt that it was Barton. Aveling played the torch over the corpse, lingering over a cluster of bullet holes in the man’s chest. There must have been twenty individual wounds, overlapping like lunar craters. They were tightly spaced, as if they had been fired in rapid succession at close range. His fingers were still curled lightly around the grip of another automatic. Auger pulled the gun free. Barton’s hand was still warm.
“Now let’s get out of here,” she said.
Aveling’s arm jerked as he squeezed off another two shots into the darkness. In the muzzle flash, Auger thought she saw something as well: a small doll-like figure scurrying along close to the rough-hewn tunnel wall. The child-sized figure wore a red dress, but the face she had seen in the instant of the flash had not been that of a child at all, but something wizened and feral: half-hag, half-ghoul, with a vile grin full of sharp, blackened teeth. The automatic felt heavy in her hands as she pointed it into the darkness and tried to aim at the spot where she thought the scurrying figure would be by now. She clicked the trigger, but nothing happened. Cursing her stupidity, she fumbled for the safety catch and tried again, but Barton must have already emptied the clip.
“We’re in a lot of trouble,” Aveling said. He stood up, keeping his knees bent in a crouch, and began to back away from the body.
“I definitely saw something that time,” Auger said, still holding the gun. “It looked like a child… but when I saw the face—”
“It wasn’t a child,” Aveling said.
“You were expecting something, weren’t you?”
“Go to the top of the class.”
Useless as it was, she couldn’t help but press the muzzle of the empty automatic against him. “Start talking to me, you pig.” That was not the word she’d had in mind, but “pig” was the worst she could bring herself to utter, even under these stressful circumstances. “The child’s from E1, isn’t she?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because whatever it is doesn’t belong here. Now tell me what you know.”
“It’s an NI infiltration unit,” Aveling said heavily. He danced the torch beam around the walls, but there was no sign of the child.
“A what?”
“Oh, come on, Auger. Surely you remember that nasty little war we don’t like to talk about nowadays? Against our friends in the Federation of Polities?”
“What about it?”
“They sent their children against us. The Neotenic Infantry: genetically engineered, cloned, psychologically programmed killing machines, packaged to look like children.”
Despite herself, she couldn’t help but be moved by the horror she heard in his voice. Anything that left that kind of a scar on a man like Aveling, she thought, had to be bad news.
“Did you fight against them?” she asked.
“I engaged them. It’s not always the same thing. Those vicious little creatures could crawl into spaces we thought were secure and hide for weeks, somehow surviving on zero rations… silent, waiting like coiled snakes, almost in a coma… until they emerged.” His breathing was becoming ragged as he slipped deeper into memories. “They were difficult to kill. Fast, strong, wound-tolerant… pain threshold off the scale. Highly attuned sense of self-preservation… and yet perfectly willing to die to serve a mission objective. And even when we knew what they were, even when we had a clear line of sight… it was almost impossible to turn our weapons on them. They looked like children. We were fighting four billion years of evolution telling us we shouldn’t squeeze that trigger.”
“War babies,” Auger said. “That was what we called them, wasn’t it?”
“So you do remember your history.” His mocking tone did nothing to disguise his fear.
She thought back to Cassandra, the Slasher representative who had passed as an adolescent on the mission that had got her into this mess in the first place. The Neotenic Infantry had been a step towards the emergence of entire factions of child-sized Slashers. But it had also been a step that no one liked to talk about now, least of all the Slashers.
“I remember that they were a genetic dead end. They didn’t work out well. They were mentally unstable and they wore out fast.”
“They were weapons,” Aveling said, “designed with a specific shelf life.”
“But no one’s seen any war babies for twenty, thirty years, Aveling. Please tell me what one is doing in a tunnel under Paris in E2.”
“Figure it out for yourself, Auger. The Slashers are here. They already have a presence in E2.”
Suddenly she felt very cold and very scared, and very far from home. “We have to get back to the surface.”
“No,” Aveling said, regaining some of his nerve. “We must get to the portal. The portal absolutely cannot be compromised.”
“It must already be compromised if they’re here. How else did they arrive?”
Aveling started to say something, but seemed to have trouble getting his words out. He made a phlegmy choking sound and fell heavily against Auger, torch and gun dropping to the floor. Auger drew breath in to scream: it was a natura
l human reaction, given that the person next to her had just been killed. But somehow she held it in. Shaking, concentrating on acting rather than thinking, she reached for the torch and replaced Barton’s useless automatic with the one Aveling had been carrying.
Keeping low, she shone the torch down the shaft and by some accident managed to pin the child to the wall with the fat circle of the beam. The light paralysed the child for a moment. It looked at her with its, horrid, shrivelled travesty of a face, wrinkled and bloodless lips framing a devilish, broken-toothed grin.
They wore out fast.
A dry, black tongue moved between the lips. In its tiny claw of a hand it held what she assumed was a gun, which it raised towards Auger. She fired first, aiming the automatic in the general direction of the child. The weapon kicked violently back against her palm as it discharged. Auger let out a small, anguished yelp of pain and surprise as the child creased in the middle and fell out of the spotlight cast by the torch. Its weapon clattered to the ground and the child let out a vile, draining shriek, like steam escaping from a boiling kettle.
Every instinct told Auger to run back the way she had come, back to daylight. She knew that there might be more of these creatures in the tunnel. But she had to see what she had killed or maimed.
She walked up to it, the gun still heavy in her hand, trusting that there was at least one more bullet in the magazine but preferring not to know for sure. The child’s shrieking was dying away, becoming a faint, almost rhythmic moan.
She kicked the child’s weapon away and knelt down next to the body. The mop of black hair on top of the creature’s head had slipped to one side, exposing a wrinkled, age-spotted skull, pale and hairless. Up close, in the unforgiving light of the torch, the child’s face was all sagging folds and bruised welts. It looked like perished rubber beneath a cracking layer of smudged make-up. The eyes were a rheumy shade of yellow. The teeth were rotten black stubs behind which the swollen black mass of a diseased tongue moved like some imprisoned monster, attempting to form coherent sounds between each wheezing moan. The child had a disgusting smell about it, like the recesses of an institutional kitchen.
“What are you doing here?” Auger asked.
In rasps, the child answered, “You don’t need to know.”
“I know what you are. You’re a military abomination, something that should have been wiped out decades ago. The question is, why weren’t you?”
Mouthfuls of fluid spilled through the broken portcullis of the child’s teeth. “We got lucky,” the child said, gurgling with what was either a slow choking death or mocking laughter.
“You call this lucky?” Auger asked, nodding towards the wound she had put in the child’s stomach.
“I’ve done what I was put here to do,” the child said. “I call that lucky.”
Then it died, its head lolling back suddenly and its eyes freezing in their sockets. Auger reached out in the darkness, feeling here and there until her hand closed around the weapon that the child had carried. She was expecting another automatic—another E2 artefact, at the very least—but the shape of the thing felt unfamiliar and alien. Standing up, she slipped the child’s gun into her handbag and stepped away from the corpse.
She heard sounds behind her: frantic scraping and rustling noises. She whipped the torch around, expecting to see rats. Instead, she picked out a boy and a girl crouched near Aveling’s body. They were rummaging in his clothes. As the light fell on them, they looked at her and hissed in anger.
“Get away from him,” she said, pointing the automatic. “I’ve already killed one of you and I’ll kill the rest of you if I have to.”
The boy flashed his teeth at her, pulling the wad of papers from Aveling’s jacket. He was completely bald, like a miniaturised version of an old man. “Thank you,” he said nastily. “We can’t have this falling into the wrong hands, can we?”
“Drop the papers,” Auger ordered.
The girl snarled something at the boy. She had something in one hand as well, glinting silver. She pointed it in Auger’s direction, but Auger fired first, the automatic dancing in her hand as she discharged three rounds. The boy hissed and dropped the papers. The girl made another angry sound and snatched the papers from the ground, but as the torchlight played over her, Auger saw that she had hit the girl as well—more by luck than skill, certainly.
“Drop the papers,” she said again.
The girl pulled away from the circle of torchlight. The boy moaned, pawing at a star-shaped wound in his thigh. There was something horrible and doglike about his movements, as if he did not quite grasp the significance of his injury. He tried to stand, but his injured leg buckled under him in a way legs were never meant to buckle. The boy let out a high-pitched shriek of anger and pain. He reached into his little schoolboy blazer and began to pull out something metallic. Auger shot him again, this time putting a bullet through his chest.
He stopped moving.
She waved the torchlight down the tunnel, but there was no sign of the girl. Shocked and breathless, Auger stumbled after her until she saw something fluttering on the ground. She picked it up, recognising one of the documents she had just given to Aveling. There was no sign that the girl had dropped anything else. Auger jammed the paper inside her own coat, making a mental note to examine it later—if she survived that long. She returned to the boy, made sure that he was dead and then did the same for Aveling, shining the torch into his face until she was certain that there would be no reaction.
She heard movement further down the shaft: a dragging sound. Crouching low, she held the automatic at arm’s length and tried to locate the source of the sound with the torch.
“Auger?” The female voice was weak and hoarse.
“Who is it?”
“Skellsgard. Thank God you’re still alive.”
A short figure emerged from the darkness, using the wall of the tunnel for support. One leg was a stiff, bloodied mass, flesh the texture of raw hamburger visible through the ribbons of her trousers. Seeing the state Skellsgard was in, Auger caught her breath. She lowered the muzzle of the automatic, but didn’t put it away.
“You’re in a bad way,” Auger said.
“I’m lucky,” Skellsgard said, with a defiant scowl. “They thought I was dead. If they’d had any doubts, they’d have finished the job properly.”
“Stay where you are. We have to get you back to the portal.”
“Portal isn’t safe.”
“It’s got to be safer than this tunnel.” Auger pushed herself to her full height, then quickly covered the distance to the injured woman. “Oh gosh, look at you,” she said.
“Like I said, I’m the lucky one.” Her voice was like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other. She had ripped one of her sleeves off and used it as a makeshift tourniquet around her upper thigh, just below the groin. “I was bleeding badly, but I don’t think they hit anything vital.”
“You need help—and not the kind you’re going to get on E2.” Auger looked around, suddenly disorientated. “Do you think they’ve all gone?”
“There were three of them.”
“I killed two. The third must have got away.” Auger thumbed the automatic’s safety catch on and slipped the gun into her waistband. It jabbed painfully into her side, but she wanted it where she could get hold of it quickly if she needed to. “Here, lean against me. How far is it to the censor?”
“About fifty metres back that way.” She gestured vaguely behind her with a toss of her head.
“Can you make it?”
Skellsgard transferred her weight to Auger. “I can try.”
“Tell me what happened. I need to know everything.”
“I can only tell you what I know.”
“That’ll do for now.”
“What did you get from Aveling?”
“Not very much,” Auger said. They were making slow progress, with Skellsgard’s movements restricted to small, agonised hops. Auger didn’t want to think abo
ut the pain she must be experiencing from her shredded leg. “Aveling knew more than I did, obviously. I got the distinct impression that he knew there were Slasher elements already here. What I don’t know is whether or not he knew how they’d got here.”
“We had suspicions,” Skellsgard said, “but this is the first clear look we’ve had at them.”
“You want to hazard a guess as to how they got here?”
“There’s only one way into E2,” Skellsgard said. “We’re sure of that. It’s our portal, and it’s been under our absolute control since we opened it. Anything foreign in E2 has to have come through the portal, and it has to have passed through the censor.”
“So I was told,” Auger said, “but that didn’t stop these… things.”
“War babies are biotechnological weapons, sure, but there’s nothing mechanical about them—nothing that the censor should have rejected. I can believe they got through, somehow or other.”
“Recently?”
“No,” Skellsgard said. “There’s no way those children came through while we’ve been running the portal. Slasher agents might have penetrated our security, might even have passed themselves off as Threshers. But children? I think we’d have noticed.”
“They got here somehow. If the portal’s the only way in, that’s how they must have arrived.”
“Then there’s only one explanation,” Skellsgard said. “Do you mind if I stop for a moment? I need to rest.”
“Be my guest.”
Skellsgard paused for a minute before speaking again, keeping her eyes closed for much of that time. “They can’t have come through the portal while we’ve been running it. Which leaves only one possibility: they must have come through before that.” She screwed up her face, her eyes watering. Auger guessed that shock must be setting in.
“Do you have any idea when?” she asked gently.
“Mars has been under our control for around twenty-three years, ever since the armistice. We didn’t discover the portal until two years ago, but that doesn’t mean anyone else could have been secretly using it during all those years. We’d have noticed something going on. Just the power drain required to keep the portal open—”
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