alt.human (8 page)

Like a drone, too deep to hear.

Like a whine, too high-pitched to detect.

A vibration seizing her innards, turning solids to jelly, to liquid, to gas. To atoms.

A pressure, so intense she could barely breathe.

A heat.

The heat... the blast-wave swept across the dunes, so intense that the sea grass smouldered, charred, broke into sporadic flame. She felt her skin tightening with that sudden pressing heat, smelled hair starting to singe.

She could smell burning, and something else. Something acrid, clawing at her throat. Burnt plastics and rubber. Something chemical that made her eyes stream and her throat sting.

She cowered in her hollow, feeling as if the world was coming to an end.

W
HEN SHE EMERGED,
clambering up the dune to look back towards the hospital, darkness was beginning to settle. The sky was red and gold and it shimmered like the air beneath the alien troopship she had seen earlier.

The smell still hung in the air. Chemicals and burn.

The hospital was no longer there.

Instead, there was a plain of a dark glass, lit a deep maroon with reflections from the sky, smooth, like a lake on a breezeless day.

Chapter Seven

I
WAS GLAD
to get out of that bar, get away from Frankhay and his black lace goons. Glad to get away from that spring-loaded dagger blade embedded
inside
his wrist.

That was alien tech, a body mod like that. It made me wonder what else Frankhay had kept hidden.

And then I thought of another possible reason for Sol sending me on this mission, hopelessly under-informed and unprepared: she must have known Frankhay would turn down the offer of collaboration, so maybe she thought I would wind the gang-boss up so much I wouldn’t get out alive, or at least I’d get enough of a beating to teach me a lesson about my place in the order of things.

I crossed the canal but then, even though the sixth had already rung, I chose not to take the direct route back through Central. I wanted to get back, but Central was just too risky. Too many aliens, too much chance of breaking some unwritten rule or code; too many armed grunts on street corners just waiting to leap into action. No law or protocol would protect an indigene from some trigger-happy orphid, wired up on combat-phreaks and paranoia.

I couldn’t work out why, but the city felt different that evening. It may have been a direct result of our little drama on Precept Square the day before. It may have been somehow connected with what had happened in Angiere – a spread of tension, alien forces stirring up opposition and then squashing it, for whatever unfathomable reasons they might have. It may simply have been a change in me: now that I had heard Callo’s story of destruction, I was more on edge, more ready to interpret an everyday grunt patrol as something sinister.

I queued for a ferry across the river. It cut the distance, but was still the longer way home, as I would need another ferry to cross again later. So close to curfew, you never knew when they might stop running, and there was the chance I would end up in a foreign Ipp for the night, huddled on the street like my old nest-sib Skids and his fellow homeless wraiths.

An orphid grunt scanned me before allowing me onto the ferry. Its buds were puffing out smoky vapours, putting everyone on edge.

From a nearby tree, a magpie chack-chack-chacked, as if taunting the grunt. Then the bird fell silent, and the grunt was re-holstering a beam-pistol.

The crossing took longer than it should have, as we waited in mid-river, held up by a fleet of big river barges lumbering past. Even this looked like something sinister, even though the barges were a common feature of the Swayne. Eventually, we landed in Satinbower, an Ipp I had only occasionally visited before, mostly back when gangs of adolescent nest-sibs from my home in Cragside would roam the city on the prowl for trouble and easy pickings.

It was an odd kind of Ipp, one that was both closely associated with the industries of the watchers and the precentians, and fiercely independent. Labour in the factories and production houses was made up of work gangs of trogs and nearly-men, organised by clan bosses who lived in alien-built terraces overlooking the waterfront. I remember, way back, there was a kid who tagged along with me and my sibs one day, who insisted his blood-father was in charge of it all: the aliens might think they owned the factories, but without the bosses they could do nothing, so it was the clan-fathers who really ran both this district
and
the aliens who owned it.

The kid was all mouth, and we’d beaten the crap out of him just for that. But still, Satinbower was different.

I pulled my coat tight around myself, dipped my head, and marched purposefully through the Ipp. I’d done my job, and I didn’t need any more trouble. I just had to get home before seventh and curfew.

Satinbower had its own unique smell. It smelled clean. The place didn’t stink of sewerage and decay and years of ruin. The buildings were mostly only two storeys high, their walls upright and squared off, made from neat bricks of clay and even plastic. The windows were wide, more like those in Central than the small bull’s-eye glass used in most of the Ipps. And power cables ran through the streets, connecting up buildings that were clearly human businesses and nest-homes.

There was wealth here in Satinbower.

Maybe that kid had been right after all. Maybe humans did have the upper hand over their alien overlords in this Ipp.

Or maybe they
had
...

At this point I was still slow to understand what was happening, but my home city had turned dangerous since the four refugees had arrived from Angiere, even here in this chlick-pet human enclave of Satinbower.

The street I walked along was busy, one of the main thoroughfares that cut across the Ipp to where the river looped back around again. That was where I hoped to catch another ferry across, and then I would be almost back in Cragside Ipp. I walked fast, trying to make up for the delays on the first river crossing.

It was peculiar, being somewhere that was built with alien technologies, but was clearly an Ipp, full of indigenes, with only the occasional alien going about its business. The mix seemed all wrong.

Towards the next main junction, the crowd bunched up, and my progress slowed.

I tried to peer over the heads of those around me but couldn’t see much, just another junction, a nondescript street cutting across this one at an angle.

Then the background drone of city noise grew louder and a dark green troopship swung round from behind a blocky grey building. It came to hang over the junction, its bulbous front tipped slightly down, like a bird of prey suspended on the breeze.

Then – no warning, nothing – beams of intense greenish-white light lanced out from the troopship and into the crowd.

I caught my breath, blinked, and the lines were still there, as if burned into my eyes in a vivid purple.

There was a pause, as if everyone was catching their breaths, absorbing what had happened. And then someone ahead of me screamed, then another, another.

The crowd surged back. Bodies and elbows and knees barged and dug and shoved. I caught an arm across my face, so hard that my ears rung and I tasted blood in my mouth.

I let myself be jostled along, following the flow like a piece of garbage floating in a storm river.

Behind me, I heard that sound again, the almost whispery sigh of the troopship’s beam weapons. And more screams and shouting. The rumble of feet on the road surface. Breaking glass. The crunching thud as a roadside stall was tipped over under the weight of bodies.

I spotted a side-alley, little more than a crevice between buildings. I heaved my body through the crowd towards it, made it, was almost sick with exertion and terror. Shaking, I leaned against a smooth wall and tried to regain my composure.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those beams cutting through the crowd. Every time I breathed in, I smelled the odour of burning human meat. Every time I swallowed, that was the taste in my mouth.

My head was a mess of all kinds of things, as I followed that gap between buildings.

I tried to stay focused on keeping moving, sidestepping the heaped garbage and iron stairways, following the alley as it turned and ran parallel with the street, squeezed between the backs of two rows of tenements.

I thought of that big square building on the junction, and back to the days of roaming with my sibs. That kid with the swagger in his click. His blood the gang boss. That encounter had been somewhere near here, maybe even that building, which could be why it all seemed so familiar. Was that the clan nest?

The sounds... occasional screams and shouts. The sudden booming of engines as the troopship – or another troopship – swung overhead.

I was heading away from the junction. A few other people had found the alley too, and were running or striding in the same direction as me.

I came to a side-street, eerily quiet.

An older man hesitated in the mouth of the alley as I approached.

“!¡
cautious
¡! You think it’s safe?” I asked him.

My accent or looks must have betrayed me as an outsider and the man’s expression closed, turned hostile. I thought he was about to answer, but instead he clicked aggressively and spat phlegmy spittle right at me.

It fell short. I looked from it to him, said, “!¡
hostile
¡! Fuck you,” and pushed past him into the street.

If everyone’s first reaction – Frankhay’s, this spitting man – was to close in, turn against anyone from another district, then Sol’s plan to unite the clans would never work.

But now, Sol no longer looked as paranoid as she had done earlier.

I walked a wide loop, my nerves on edge, the whole city’s nerves on edge. At one point, as my route took me up a slight rise, I looked back and saw a pair of troopships hanging over Satinbower Ipp, noses down, twitchy and heavy, occasional beams stabbing down to the streets below.

Smoke hung over Satinbower as seventh rang out across the city.

Curfew.

There would be no ferries now until morning. I was stranded in a foreign Ipp that was under assault from alien forces.

That was when it really sunk in. Fleeing the troopers had been a short-term thing, a survive-
now
thing. But now I had to get through the night, without being rounded up or summarily shot by slaughter-happy grunts.

I roamed the deserted streets until darkness fell. There was no lighting, apart from that which escaped the shuttered windows of the buildings I passed.

In the distance I could still hear the troopships, and occasionally I heard the electric whine of street vehicles – more grunts, I presumed, on a sweep for curfew-breakers. There would be many of us tonight, with so many caught up in the raid.

I clung to the shadows and alleyways, looking for shelter and finding none.

Coming to the river, I darted across the road and dropped down to the rocky shore. There, I almost trod on a dark shape which turned out to be a man bundled in rags.

He swore at me, but didn’t move.

A little farther on was another, a bone-thin woman, almost certainly a wraith, or a recovering one.

I found a niche in the boulders and tried to settle for what was to be a long, cold night. If the clanless slept here, then either it was a safe spot overlooked by curfew checks or I would at least be part of a crowd when trouble kicked off.

I huddled up, wrapped my arms around myself and tried not to shiver.

“F
RANKHAY SAID NO.
With a knife.”

Sol shrugged. “!¡
resignation
¡! So where’d you get to last night, eh?”

I’d found her at one of our workshops in Cragside that converted one kind of pulp into another. I didn’t know what for, only that there was money in it, and some degree of protection for the clan.

Now, we walked back towards the clan nest at Villa Virtue. I was sore and tired from an uncomfortable, sleepless night. Right up until dawn and the end of curfew, troopships had swung over that riverside doss, and patrols had passed by on the road, but the search had always passed over the rocks without pause.

By morning, my body felt like it had frozen itself into position. Shuffling to the ferry, filthy and stubbled, I knew I must look like one of the dossers I’d shared the rocks with, and wondered if the boundary guards would even let me cross. But I had money in my pocket and my pids gave me authority to travel, and so I was allowed to pass.

Sol was watching me closely as we entered the nest and headed up to the roof terrace. “!¡
weary
¡! There was trouble in Satinbower,” I told her.

Two of the refugees were there, I saw, and the chlick, Saneth. They sat at a table, with bowls of tea. I hadn’t known that chlicks drank tea.

We went to join them, pulling up another bench. This was the first time I had been so close to a chlick and not been threatened.

“!¡
deferential
¡! Saneth-ra was telling us of the incident at Satinbower,” said Sol, dipping her head as she added the deferential -ra to the chlick’s name.

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Forty-seven humans were seized by an orphid task-force commanded by watcher Hadeen factionaries.” The chlick’s voice was soft and whispery, like a breeze through dry leaves. Its grey-brown face was grooved deeply with folds and wrinkles, pocked and scarred and calloused by the passing years. I saw now that the chlick had a false eye, some kind of mod; it looked metallic, polished to a dull shine. The false eye moved independently of the real one, disconcertingly so. “!¡
probably reliable hearsay
¡! The human nest-parents thus seized were long-standing favourites of watcher Nullist factionaries. Many mutual ties of finance, favour and manipulation.”

Callo was nodding. “!¡
dread
¡! It’s coming here,” she said.