alt.human (11 page)

“But why?”

“!¡
patient | calming
¡! There are some who would wipe out what remains of humankind,” she said. “What happened in Angiere has happened elsewhere. But there are others who feel different, who see in humankind a hope for a dying universe.”

“‘What remains of humankind’?”

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! Humankind is a rare and broken race,” said the thing that was Callo. “But it has something. Something different. We will not let you be wiped out.”

I put my hands to my own chest then, inside my vest, and I tried to bury fingers into flesh that would not yield, a seam that would not be found. I tried to tear myself apart to reveal a mass of muscle-like white fibres, but no, I would not be torn, my chest would not be opened.

I was whole, not assembled, constructed... whatever it was that had produced this woman before me, who stirred feelings deep inside me even now, when I knew she was, as she had said,
other
.

I went to her, then, that fold of flesh still hanging away from her torso.

I put a hand to her cheek.

She felt real. Her face felt like a real woman’s face. The slight musk of her body scent smelled like that of a woman.

“!¡
confused | distracted
¡! I don’t comprehend what you’ve just told me,” I said. “I can’t take it in. I can’t hold it all in my head. But I will. I’ll work it out. I’ll deal with it. And then I’ll work out just what it is that I should do next.”

I backed away, turned, then paused in the doorway of her small room as she said, “!¡
impressed
¡! Remember, Dodge. There is a great deal at stake here. And not everything is as it seems.”

I
DIDN’T GO
straight back to Ruth and Divine’s party.

Instead, I took a detour and sat quietly, alone, in a common area. This hall had been used as a classroom when I was a pup. I remembered fooling about there with Skids and Pi and Jemerie while Vechko had lectured us about the importance of clan history.

I thought of Callo. There had always been something different about her, a spark, a sense of otherness. That was what had intrigued me, had drawn my mind back to her, attracted me.

But what was she?

Alien? Construct? Human with extreme mods? I was sure she had talked of her blood-father shortly after arriving here in Cragside. He had been one of the early victims of the purge in Angiere. So maybe she had been human once, at least.

Were all four of the refugees the same as Callo? All four, our not-quite-human guardians, come to protect us from what had happened in Angiere?

I remembered then something the chlick, Saneth, had said to me: just as a chlick carries within it the potential to be he, she, or both, the alien had asked me what potential I had within, what potential my kind might carry. Something in our hearts, something in our heads.
Something different
, Callo had said.

She had also vowed that they would not let humankind be wiped out. That was hardly reassuring after what had happened in Angiere, though...

I sat back on my low wooden bench, my back against the cool wall, and thought of all the times I had come to this hall as a pup. Times when my main concern had been how to stop Vechko or Lissy being quite so boring, or how to get into Pi or Carille’s pants.

I stood, deciding that my problem right then was that I had become too sober. The solution to that was simple, and I headed up to the terrace in search of beer.

T
HE RAID WAS
abrupt, like thunder out of a clear summer sky.

I was on the terrace arguing about the best route to Satinbower with Pi, a wide-eyed, big-breasted mouse of a girl. By this point in the evening my encounter with Callo was buried beneath a few more mugs of beer and the generous distractions offered by Pi.

We were laughing, leaning close, clicking soft subliminals at each other, all tease and flirt and come-on.

She smelled of beer and garlic and lilies. I wanted her, then, badly. I know it was a reaction to what had passed earlier between me and Callo. Pi was a diversion, a distraction from what was in my head, and a damned good one at that.

I leaned closer to hear what she had just said, a low drone smothering her words.

Then I paused, turned, and the bulbous head of a troopship was suddenly looming around the crag that formed the back of our nest’s roof terrace.

I remembered the troopships at Satinbower. We had just been talking about it, me painting up my experience there when I had seen the Satinals’ clan-nest being destroyed.

Beams of light lanced down from the troopship, transfixing us.

I felt unable even to move my muscles, but I knew that was not a real thing, just an effect of the sudden shock, the fear, a rabbit frozen by the beam of a torchlight.

Sol moved.

She spun, found Marek and Callo and rushed them to the back of the terrace. If she could get them into the caves they might be safe.

But I knew immediately that we wouldn’t all be able to escape that way. The halls were narrow, the doorways few. A rush of people would block the passageway in no time.

The troopship swung round the crag and came to hang in the air above us. Door panels dematerialised along its flanks and spat out a stream of armour-suited grunts. They dropped to the terrace, their suits decelerating them an instant before landing. They started clicking and barking orders at us to stay still, to move over there, to stay calm, to say nothing, to stop rushing around!

A few shots from the grunts’ beam-weapons were fired into the air, then someone – Ruth, I saw – started to object and was cuffed across the jaw by an orphid grunt. She went reeling into Divine’s arms, her face a bloody mess.

Closer to where I was standing, a grey-bearded man – Maybry, I thought – was knocked from his feet by a barging grunt and lay groaning and sobbing.

Then a gun fired, and I realised someone, stupidly, had shot at the grunts.

This was going to get much worse, and quickly.

I bundled Pi over to the wall surrounding the terrace. The street below was deserted.

“Come on,” I said, and swung a leg over the wall.

Pi hesitated, then joined me.

We paused partway down. Overhead, I could still hear the drone of the troopship and see its floodlights spilling out over the terrace.

Pi was breathing hard and shaking as she clung onto the crag. “!¡
urgent | reassuring
¡! It’s okay,” I told her. “They didn’t see us. I know the way down from here. Used to climb here when I was a pup–”

“!¡
exasperated
¡! Fuck’s sake, Dodge. It’s not that. Just... just how high up are we?”

I hadn’t considered that she might be scared of heights.

“!¡
reassuring
¡! It’s okay,” I said again. “Keep looking at where your hands are. We’re on a kind of ledge. Just need to follow it round to the slope, and then we’re not really climbing, it’s just a steep hill, down to Jury’s Gap.” The Gap was one of the side-entrances into the cave system that ran through the craggy hills. We were almost there.

I started to move, but when I looked back, Pi was frozen in the same position, still shaking, muttering something under her breath.

“Come on,” I hissed.

I could see Jury’s Gap now, a dark slash in the crag just across and down a little from where we were.

I reached the end of the ledge, planted my feet on the steep slope of the crag, twisted to look behind me.

Pi hadn’t moved.

Then a beam of light swung out and around from above, the troopship moving, searching for escapees. It locked on her almost immediately.

I looked at the Gap, so close, but I hesitated too long and another beam swung round and locked on me. Again, I felt my muscles seizing, and that made me wonder if maybe there
was
something more than just the psychological impact stopping me from moving.

A grunt on a floating pad came down and seized first Pi and then me and transported us back up to the terrace, where most of my clan had been rounded up in small groups.

W
E WERE KEPT
on the terrace for most of the night, huddled into little groups, penned in by jagwire. We weren’t allowed to move around, not even allowed to sit. They scanned our pids almost immediately. Although Sol had returned to the terrace and been caught, all four of the refugees – or whatever they were – from Angiere had successfully escaped. Or at least, they had not been caught here on the roof terrace with the rest of us.

I worked my way among the twenty or so in my small group, trying to find out if anyone had picked up even a snippet of information about what was happening.

According to what I learned, this raid had been prompted by what had happened in Precept Square. The watchers had worked out who it was that had been responsible for the stolen pids we’d used to mask our identities, and those of the four refugees from Angiere.

Alternatively, this was all the fault of the four: they were not refugees, but spies, and they had led the watchers and their grunts here tonight. There had always been something odd about them. You could never trust an Angierean, after all.

Or maybe this was just another in an apparently random pattern of raids on clan-nests across the city. It was exactly what had happened in Angiere, and now it was happening here. The Satinals’ clan-nest had been destroyed; we were lucky the troopship had not simply blasted us out of existence.

Or the watchers were hunting down rebel factions, humans who were organising opposition to the way we were treated, and somehow they had identified us in that category.

And then I heard a name. Reed Trader. They were looking for Reed Trader, and thought we were harbouring him. That was the identity I had used on that day in Precept Square, one of a batch of pids I had stolen from a lab in Cheapside the week before.

That made me glad I was always so thorough. We had wiped the stolen pids from our bodies that evening. I had been Reed Trader, but I was no more.

As I moved among the detainees, I tried to calm them. My sib, Jemerie, in particular, was fizzing with aggression, his clicks degenerating into a torrent of hate. He’d always been fiery, particularly when he’d had a drink.

I saw that look in his eye, put my hands on his arms, said, “!¡
calming | urgent | sib-bond
¡! Jemerie, Jemerie, you want to get burnt to a fucking cinder, Jemerie? !¡
calming | insistent | sib-bond
¡! That what you want, my old sib?”

For a moment I thought he was going to swing for me. Either that or just twist out of my grip and lunge at the nearest armour-suited grunt, regardless of any jagwire in his way.

Maybe he thought that too, just for a heartbeat, but then he saw that Divine was standing at my shoulder, arms loose at her sides, ready to stop him making a suicidal fool of himself and risking retribution for the rest of us when he did so.

He visibly calmed, rolled his shoulders, breathed deeply. Shrugged at me, and gave that old smile. “’S okay,” he said. “!¡
apologetic
¡! I’m easy now, Dodge. I’m easy.”

T
HEY TOOK
S
OL.

Our nest-mother was in a group by the main doorway back into the nest. They knew who she was. One of the watcher officers went to her, spoke a few words, and Sol slumped.

She looked defeated. Broken, like a street-fighter who’s lost his last match on Precept Square. That, more than anything, made me believe that we would never win. We might hide, we might cower in the gutters and dark places, but they would hunt us down whenever they wanted.

A grunt took Sol’s arm and tugged her away from her group. I watched as my nest-mother was led to a float-pad and lifted up into the troopship.

As the door panel closed around her, I wondered if we would ever see Sol again.

They took old Vechko next. He had been with Sol, in the group by the doorway. He went without resistance too, and then I realised they had probably been phreaked, all resistance knocked out of them by a vapour from the watcher officer or one of the nearby grunts.

One by one, they took each of our clan elders and floated them up to the troopship.

Much later, as the sun silvered the eastern skyline and birds started to sing from the trees up on the crag, a watcher officer came to my group.

This one had taken the form of a human, but it was only a temporary arrangement. Watchers were colony beings, each body made up of hundreds of individual creatures, jelly-like polyps that could stick, merge, reconfigure at will. A watcher’s body could consist of as little as a dozen polyps, as small as a mouse, or it could be a vast, sprawling mass of billions that covered a continent. A watcher could absorb mechanical and other biological inclusions into whatever form its collective body was currently taking. A watcher was never just a watcher, it was always more than it seemed.

This watcher was clad in an armoured body-suit. Its head rose from square shoulders on a slender neck. Its face took the form of a human face, a man’s with a prominent brow-ridge and a square jaw. Its features were smooth, though: no mouth, no eyes, no nostrils in its perfectly formed nose.

I’d never seen a watcher so close before. Normally they remained aloof, leaving their grunts to do their dirty work on the ground.

It surveyed my group and then, with a puff of fear-inducing phreaks that turned my bowels to liquid, said, “!¡
threat | menace
¡! You have no leaders now.” It had no mouth to talk with; I don’t know where the words emanated from. Its voice was a rasp, with an oddly musical tone running through it, like two voices at once. The sound alone made me want to cry. “!¡
commanding
¡! Tell me: who are your leaders now?”

We looked at each other. We shuffled our feet.

And then I saw that Divine was staring at me. Jemerie, too. Ruth. Pursney and Pi. Most of them my age, or older than me, but...

All looking at me.

The watcher had turned its face towards me as well, now.