by Gary Gibson
‘Can’t tell you,’ Casey replied, and rapped the map with the knuckles of one hand. ‘But remember, they’re hostile with sufficient provocation.’
‘Somebody,’ I said, ‘is going to have to tell me why we’re here, and what the hell a bee-brain is.’
Casey’s eyes narrowed. ‘They briefed you, right?’
I shook my head. ‘Schultner wasn’t available. I was told I’d be briefed on arrival.’
Casey stared at me for a moment, then looked over at the soldiers loitering nearby. ‘Hey,’ he yelled. ‘Was Arnold Wotzko expected to be here? Or Schultner, the other guy in charge of briefings?’
One of the soldiers dropped a cigarette stub and rubbed at it with his boot. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Just us.’
Oskar gave me an I-told-you-so look, while Nadia just shook her head. ‘Another fuck-up by our glorious leaders,’ she muttered.
‘So I was supposed to have been briefed by now?’
I saw Oskar reach inside his shirt and take a firm grip on one of the many fetishes he wore around his neck. ‘It’s a bad omen,’ he moaned. ‘We should head home before it’s—’
‘Shut up,’ snapped Casey, stabbing one gloved finger at Oskar. ‘I’m tired of your superstitious bullshit, Oskar. Nothing’s going to go wrong.’
‘For a change, I hope,’ Nadia said under her breath.
Casey shot her a deadly look.
‘Well, seriously,’ said Nadia, looking at everyone else, ‘am I the only one who double-checks every piece of equipment they give us?’
‘Should we be expecting problems?’ I asked, alarmed.
‘Not outside of the usual snafus, no,’ said Casey. ‘And you can blame the Authority for all the substandard gear. There’s only so much you can do with the tools you’re given.’
‘Those SUVs don’t look too shoddy to me,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Casey. ‘That’s why we grabbed them when we found them. They’re infinitely more reliable than the jeeps. Now focus,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on the map once again. ‘And Jerry, if you’ve got questions, feel free to ask them. You’re assigned to Nadia’s team, so maybe she can fill you in on anything I miss out once we’re all under way.’
I looked at Nadia and she nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said to Casey. ‘So where are we, exactly?’
‘Just south of Sao Paolo, in this alternate’s Brazil.’ Casey nodded in the direction of the skyscrapers and the nearest Hive. ‘The bridge leading over the reservoir and into town is wrecked, but the water’s shallow enough to ford in the SUVs. Then we follow the road into the city centre.’ He moved his fingers across the map. ‘These red circles indicate the location of three properties belonging to a French research outfit called Retièn Biophysique. There’s a research lab, and also a separate government-financed facility they used for long-term cryogenic storage. Lastly there’s an office suite, making a total of three locations for them in this vicinity.’
I saw that the three circles were quite widely separated. Lines connected them to each other by what struck me as very indirect routes indeed.
‘Now,’ said Casey, ‘we’ve already ripped the cryogenics facility apart, and we dug up a lot of stuff, but the other two places we’ve only scouted at a distance. That’s mainly because they both sit more or less directly on the territorial borders between the two Hives that dominate the city. Bee-brains from either Hive have been fighting whenever they run into each other. If we wait too long, could be they’ll wind up demolishing Retièn’s labs and offices before we get a chance to look inside.’
‘How certain are we that Retièn is responsible for the extinction event here?’ asked Haden.
‘Near as damn sure,’ Casey replied. ‘We’re going in as two teams to do a quick reconnoitre and grab every piece of computer equipment or paperwork we can load in the cars before rendezvousing back here no later than nightfall.’
‘What happened to the people here?’ I asked, wondering yet again what possible use the Authority could have for such information.
‘They were all infected by a highly modified variant of Toxoplasma Gondii,’ explained Winifred.
I looked at her. ‘And that is?’
‘A parasitic agent that normally triggers suicidal behaviour in some mammalian species in its unaltered form, particularly rats and mice,’ she explained. ‘At heart, it reprogrammes mammalian behaviour via infection. Imagine being able to spray a whole advancing army with a gene-spliced variant so they all went crazy, or turned on each other. Or even better, it made them so terrified of the enemy that they put down their weapons and ran away.’
‘And how does that connect to those things over there on the horizon?’ I asked, nodding at the Hives.
‘Somewhere down the line,’ said Winifred, ‘they got funding from the military to create genetic chimeras, through new gene recombination techniques they’d developed. It seems the original idea was to use genetically modified insects as a vector for delivering the parasite. Something went wrong, and a very unpleasant mutation got loose and interbred with the local bee populations. Then the bees infected people, and they in turn became active vectors for spreading the infection yet further. It took maybe a year for the entire globe to be subsumed. The people here are still alive, but . . . they aren’t really people any more.’ She shook her head wistfully. ‘I’d kill for the opportunity to carry out a long-term study of the bee-brains. They’re not merely infected. They’re a kind of chimera themselves, almost a new species, in fact, born of a symbiotic relationship that reached its apotheosis in the night patrols.’
‘You had shots, right?’ said Casey, before I had a chance to ask Winifred what a ‘night patrol’ was.
‘Sure,’ I said, rubbing at the exposed skin of my arm as if I had already been stung. The sound of buzzing insects in the nearby woods now took on an ominous quality.
‘Then you’re safe from infection,’ Casey continued. ‘But you need to keep a serious fucking distance from the bee-brains in case they attack you. See this?’
I leaned forward, watching as he moved his finger along the zigzagging lines joining the target circles to each other. ‘These are safe routes in and out of the city,’ he explained, ‘meaning there’s a low probability of running into trouble so long as we all stick to them.’ He looked around the others. ‘Me and Nadia are taking charge of a team each. Jerry, Oskar, you’re going for the labs with Nadia. Myself, Haden and Winnie are heading for the office complex.’
Nadia stepped around the table and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Stop looking so goddam worried. This is a low-risk operation. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how things work on this alternate. We’ll have remote drones in the air the whole time we’re out there.’
‘Here,’ said Casey, handing a copy of the map to Nadia. He next picked up a thick envelope and handed it to Oskar. ‘Everyone check your weapons and gear, and get ready to move out in ten. Jerry, grab a rifle from the supplies tent.’
All this, I thought, just to retrieve what I imagined would amount to little more than some paper files and computer disks.
I stepped past the drone-charging station and pulled a rifle from a rack inside the supplies tent. I slung it over my shoulder by its strap, then followed Nadia and Oskar over to the second SUV, with Lucky darting ahead of us. I made sure to get in to the front passenger seat this time and felt the undercarriage sway slightly as the enormous hound climbed in the rear. It hung its massive head over my shoulder in exactly the way I’d worried it might, hitting me with a full blast of its sickly sweet breath.
Suddenly the dog whined and jumped back out again. Oskar tried to coax her back in, but to no avail. In the end he had no choice but to grab hold of the dog and literally lift her back inside the car, no mean feat given that the animal was nearly the same size as its owner. Nadia, clearly amused, watched Oskar struggle in the rear-view mirror.
‘What the hell is wrong with that animal?’ I grumbled, as Oskar climbed in next to the dog, pulling the
door shut before it could stage another escape attempt.
‘Beats me,’ said Oskar, stroking Lucky’s thick fur in an attempt to calm her down. ‘She doesn’t normally get like this.’ He frowned at me. ‘She ain’t gonna bite you, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I’m not crazy about dogs,’ I admitted.
‘As long as you’re not anything like Wallace Deans,’ Oskar replied, ‘you’ll get along just fine.’
‘What did Wallace do?’ I asked.
Oskar had finally got the dog settled, although she whined and shifted as Nadia reached for the ignition. Something was making the animal nervous, but I was damned if I knew what it was.
‘The murderous asshole tried to kill Lucky,’ said Oskar.
‘That’s not quite how it was,’ said Nadia.
‘He tried to run her over,’ said Oskar, his voice rising in protest.
Nadia leaned towards me as she pulled on her seatbelt. ‘The drunken idiot got behind the wheel of a jeep after a night at the Mauna Loa and nearly hit Lucky.’
‘I noticed he likes a drink,’ I said, then stopped myself adding: and so do the rest of you.
Oskar laughed harshly. ‘You think?’
Casey pulled ahead of us in the SUV we had first arrived in, waving out of the window to us with his battered leather hat.
‘Wallace used to be a more-or-less functional alcoholic,’ said Nadia, echoing my earlier thoughts as she sent the car bouncing over the grass. ‘Although he’s been getting less and less functional with each passing day.’
‘So he’s always been like that?’ I asked.
‘It only really got bad after his arrest,’ said Oskar.
I looked at Nadia for explanation. ‘Some of Greenbrooke’s men caught him smuggling contraband from an alternate we’d been exploring,’ Nadia explained, seeing my expression. ‘They kind of went to town on him.’
I stared at her in surprise. ‘Does that kind of thing happen a lot?’
‘You mean contraband? More than you’d think. Alcohol, cigarettes – just the usual stuff. Anything that’s an improvement on the shit the Authority supply us with.’
‘And does Bramnik know this goes on?’ I asked.
‘Almost certainly,’ said Nadia. ‘Although he seems to prefer to turn a blind eye.’
‘So who gets the contraband?’ I asked. ‘And what does Wallace get back?’
Nadia grinned lasciviously. ‘Let’s just say there’s a couple of women among Bramnik’s staff who don’t mind granting certain favours in return for the right goods.’
‘So Wallace was . . .’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded, then twisted around to regard Oskar. ‘And not just Wallace.’
I glanced back at Oskar and saw the smirk vanish from his face. He peered out of the window as if he had developed a sudden deep fascination with our surroundings.
‘What kind of items?’ I asked.
‘Whisky – certainly not the home-brew variety Yuichi comes up with,’ she said. ‘Cigars, some electronic goods. Stuff like that, all from alternates we’ve been exploring.’
‘But surely they can get those things themselves back on the Authority’s own alternate?’ I asked.
‘Apparently not, if the girls on Bramnik’s staff are prepared to put out for it,’ said Nadia. ‘Makes you wonder just what it’s like over on their own alternate, doesn’t it?’
Nadia guided the vehicle down an incline below the ruined bridge, our passage raising a high plume of water as the SUV made its way across the shallow water. Then she steered up the other bank and back onto the road on the far side of the motorway bridge.
Up ahead, Casey gunned his engine, and his SUV shot forward, bouncing as it climbed onto a road. He put his arm out the window and gave us the finger. Beside me, I saw Nadia’s mouth tighten, while Oskar giggled from the rear.
‘Fucking asshole,’ muttered Nadia.
Up ahead, the other SUV had almost vanished from sight. They were headed east, us to the west.
‘This is the first I heard of any of this,’ I said.
‘Greenbrooke tried to force a crackdown. Bramnik got Wallace released in short order following his arrest, but by the time we got him back, it was clear that the Patriots had banged him up pretty good. Wallace claimed he’d been tortured.’
I stared at her, aghast. ‘Tortured him? For what, stealing a couple of bottles of booze?’
‘Not quite.’ Nadia shook her head. ‘Some alternates we visit are more technologically developed than the ones most of us come from. That means there’s all kinds of advanced technology just lying around, asking to be taken. That’s what the Patriots accused him of trying to smuggle back to the island. To be honest, they’re not entirely wrong in wanting to stamp on it. Sometimes you can’t be sure what’s safe to bring back, and what isn’t. Depending on where you’re going or where you’ve been, sometimes there’s a strict quarantine procedure, and that covers more than just technology.’ She glanced at me as she drove. ‘As you know.’
‘And he does this kind of thing a lot?’
‘The man has sticky fingers,’ Nadia replied. ‘I don’t know if it’s kleptomania or the expression of some childhood trauma, but try not to leave anything lying around where he can grab it.’
‘So whatever they did to him, it was bad enough to turn him into an alcoholic?’
She shrugged. ‘He was on that road anyway. I think they just hurried him along a little bit.’ She pulled up at an intersection. I saw a row of shops with apartments above, their windows smashed and open to the elements. The wind sighed around us.
Nadia handed me the map. ‘Here. You’re the navigator.’
‘Sure.’ I tried not to show how nervous I really was.
We drove on through deserted streets and across cracked and overgrown tarmac for another twenty minutes, while I told Nadia where to take each turn as we followed the strange, zigzagging routes through the city.
By now we were close enough to the first Hive that I could see just how rough edged and patchy looking its exterior really was. What on Earth, I wondered, lay within? Did people live in there? Or something else?
‘These people,’ I asked. ‘The bee-brains. Do they still look like human beings?’
‘Pretty much,’ she said, looking distracted as she peered ahead, slowing a little as we reached another intersection. ‘Okay, we’re still where we’re supposed to be. That’s all well and good.’
I glanced at a street sign in Portuguese, then thought I saw something moving up at the next intersection. I told Nadia, and she pulled to a stop, before taking a pair of binoculars from the dashboard and peering ahead.
‘Trouble?’ asked Oskar.
‘Probably not,’ said Nadia. ‘I don’t see anything, so might just have been a lone . . . wait, no. I see them now. Hoo boy. A lot of them, too.’
I licked suddenly dry lips. ‘What do we do? Take a different route?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Long as we keep our distance, they’re going to act like they don’t even know we’re here.’ She put the binoculars back down. ‘But we might have to wait a little while until they’ve passed through.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Fixing that thing up,’ she said, nodding through the windscreen at the Hive. ‘It’s built out of scraps of stuff from all over. You can see bee-brains hammering buildings apart all over the place. Best thing to do is wait until they’re gone, like I said. Here,’ she said, handing me the binoculars. ‘Look and learn.’
I lifted them to my eyes and saw maybe a couple of dozen bedraggled-looking figures making their way across the intersection ahead. The majority were naked or wore rags that barely clung to their flesh. There were men and women of all ages, but no children. Every one of them was carrying something – bricks, or bits of rubble, and in some cases what looked to me like crude home-made tools. Any one of them could have glanced up and seen us immediately, less than a few dozen metres farther down the road. No
ne of them did. They looked, I thought, like people walking in their sleep.
‘Do they know what they’re doing?’ I asked. ‘I mean, are they consciously aware?’
She shook her head. ‘Not according to Winifred, no. She’s the expert on this stuff.’
‘They’re not really human,’ said Oskar from behind me. ‘There’s a reason they’re called bee-brains. Don’t get any ideas that you can communicate with them in any way. They can get pretty vicious at close enough range.’
A breeze stirred the air outside, and a few of the creatures came to a stumbling halt. One thickset fellow, his filthy face partly shrouded by a scraggly tangle of hair, looked up and towards us, then staggered in our direction a few paces before coming to a halt. His eyes were black, with hardly any white showing, every trace of humanity gone.
‘Let me see that,’ said Nadia, snatching the binoculars back. She stared silently ahead for several seconds. One or two other bee-brains had also come to a halt, swaying their heads as if they were sniffing at the air.
The breeze died down. All of a sudden they appeared to lose interest in us and began to shuffle off after the rest.
‘Well,’ said Nadia, lowering the glasses from her face, ‘if that ain’t a first. Did you see that, Oskar?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It was almost like they were looking our way.’
‘Could be coincidence,’ she said. ‘Them being completely brain dead and all.’
‘They don’t look that dangerous,’ I said.
‘There are three of us,’ said Nadia, ‘and a couple billion of them scattered all over this alternate. That means they win any fight by a knockout, even before they get in the ring.’
The last of the bee-brains moved out of sight. I felt my skin prickle at the thought of the people those strange, shambling figures had once been. I felt the irrational urge to breathe shallowly, as if it might protect me from a whole cornucopia of imagined airborne infections.
‘Here we go,’ said Nadia, putting the SUV into first gear. We trundled slowly forwards and across the now deserted intersection.