Terminal World (49 page)

It took him an hour to fill the bag and the crate, and as much time again to reflect on his choices. The crate was too cumbersome to manage at the same time as the bag, so he left the bag locked in the laboratory while he carried the crate to the quartermaster who was supervising the loading of Curtana’s airship. ‘Be gentle with it,’ Quillon advised, at the risk of insulting the man’s competence. ‘You’re holding human lives, not just glass and chemicals.’

‘Spearpointer lives,’ the man said, as if there was a distinction.

‘I’ve cut enough of you open to know we all bleed the same colour,’ Quillon answered.

Night had fallen when he returned to
Purple Emperor′
s under-levels. He didn’t relish his visits to the laboratory under any circumstances, but night was his least favourite time. The vorgs never slept. They just waited and watched, and smelled of maggoty, fly-ridden meat that should have been thrown out days ago. At night the space between his bench and the cages seemed to contract, bringing the horrors closer.

He slid the key into the lock and turned it. Except the key wouldn’t turn, as if he had already unlocked the door.

With a terrible sense of dread, Quillon pushed the door. For all its heaviness, for all that it was designed to keep in fire and vorgs and keep out the curious and malicious, it swung open with almost insolent ease.

He had left the laboratory unlocked. For a moment that was all he could focus on. And yet he remembered withdrawing the key on his way out with the crate. He had locked it, hadn’t he? Or had he meant to, and then been distracted by the heaviness of the supplies?

The lights were still burning. He stepped inside and locked the door properly behind him. From his present vantage point, nothing appeared untoward. The vorgs were still in their cages, and at first glance the serum lines looked undisturbed. Still his heart was racing. He had not always heeded Ricasso’s guidance concerning the axe, and he had neglected to sign for the revolver Ricasso had promised him, but now he walked to the wall and lifted the axe from its mounting. It felt bludgeon-heavy in his hands. It would be difficult enough to hold and carry, let alone swing. With each day his muscular strength ebbed another degree. It was not something he would have needed in the Celestial Levels.

The room was as quiet as it ever got. There was still the drone of
Purple Emperor’s
engines, the steady drip from the filtration apparatus, the occasional metallic sound as one of the vorgs stirred in its confinement, the soft click and whirr of the tall cabinet, going about its hidden business. But nothing had altered since his departure. He moved along the cages, getting only as close as he dared. The caged things regarded him with the open chassis-work of their gristle-filled head-assemblies. Camera eyes clicked and whirred and hypodermic fangs telescoped in and out, glistening with ropes and threads of sticky mucus. To his intense relief all was well. He still could not understand why he had not locked the door, but the mistake had not led to anything more serious. Given the rush to prepare
Painted Lady,
the error had been - if not forgivable - then at least human.

He returned the axe to the wall and walked to the bench, ready to collect the bag.

He sensed a dark, stealthy presence at his shoulder. Heard the click of a mechanism and felt cold metal touch his neck. His first thought was absurd: that one of the vorgs had escaped and was now about to sink its fangs into him. But all the cages were still occupied. The moment passed and he realised that what he had heard was a gun’s safety being clicked off, and that the hot breath on his ear was human.

A voice breathed, ‘Careless, Doctor, leaving that door open.’

‘I didn’t, Spatha.’ There was no need to turn around. He knew who he was talking to.

‘The door unlocked itself?’

‘It must have, if you managed to get in here.’ Quillon swallowed, trying to regulate his breathing. ‘But then again I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You managed to get that book in and out of my bag, and those ridiculous paper angels. It can’t have been difficult for you to make a copy of Ricasso’s key, even though I thought I kept my eye on it all the time.’

‘For an intelligent man, you’re not very bright,’ Spatha said. ‘The key was the least of our worries. You think
that
would have stopped us? We could have found a way into this room any time we desired, with very little difficulty.’

‘Then why didn’t you?’

‘I’ll leave you to work that one out.’ Spatha jabbed the gun into Quillon’s skin. ‘Here’s a clue, though. If we wanted to sabotage Ricasso’s work, we needed a scapegoat. For a long time there wasn’t one. But then you came along and ... well, it’s all falling into place now, isn’t it?’

‘Why would I sabotage this work? I’m the one who was pushing to get the medicines to Spearpoint.’

‘You’re also an exiled freak who has every reason in the world to hate that place. And a proven liar.’

‘Whatever your arguments against Ricasso, this isn’t the way to hurt him. We all need these drugs. He’s doing useful work.’

‘I can see you’ve been spending far too much time in his presence.’ Spatha shoved Quillon towards the door. ‘Unlock it. Leave it open. Then come back here.’

Quillon did as he was told. He knew there was no point in running. Perhaps if he had still been holding the axe he might have been able to do something ... but no, that was just wishful thinking. Spatha would have put a bullet through his skull before he managed to swing the axe.

He unlocked the door and pulled it open. The corridor - the clear route to the rest of the ship - beckoned.

‘Very good, Doctor. Now open one of the vorg cages.’

‘What?’

‘Open a cage. The nearest one will do.’

It was the vorg that Ricasso had shown to Quillon on his first visit to the laboratory, the one without hindlimbs. The keys were kept on the opposite side of the room, near the axe mounting.

‘Whatever you think you’ll achieve here—’

‘I won’t say it again. Open the cage.’

Quillon went to the keys and selected the right one. The axe was close enough to grab, but useless against an adversary standing a dozen paces away with a gun aimed straight at him. He could see the weapon properly now - not a service revolver, but a heavy automatic with a long barrel and an under-slung magazine.

‘If you’re going to kill it, you don’t need me to open the cage.’

‘Killing it will come later. First it has to do a little damage, cause a little mayhem, just enough to make it plain that it was always a mistake to keep these things aboard ship.’

‘The vorg will kill me as soon as I open the cage. Then it’ll kill you.’

‘No, it won’t. Not while I’m aiming the gun at both of you, and not while it has a chance to make a break for freedom through that open door. They’re not clever, but they’re not stupid either. Do it, please, Doctor.’

Quillon looked at Spatha’s weapon and mentally compared it with the heavy machine guns he remembered being used against the vorgs on the ground. Those guns had ripped the vorgs apart but he wasn’t certain that a few bullets from an automatic would have anything like the same impact. All he could do was hope that the vorg would leave quickly, enact the chaos Spatha hoped for and then be killed.

He opened the cage, allowing the iron door to swing wide. The vorg, which had so often moved within the cage when escape was an impossibility, now appeared quite inert. It was lying down - crouching on its forelimbs, its hindlimbs gone, its segmented tail still present. The secretion line was still embedded in it, running back to the dripping apparatus on the bench.

‘Remove it,’ Spatha said. ‘Do whatever you have to do to make it wake up.’

‘It’s perfectly awake,’ Quillon said. ‘It’s just working out what to do next.’ He was guessing, of course, but he thought it was a good guess.

‘I won’t ask again.’

Quillon took hold of the secretion line and ripped it from the vorg. The tip of the line sprang out of the metal ribcage, dragging a gobbet of meat with it. The vorg reacted to that. It twitched, a convulsive movement running from its tail to its mechanism-packed snout. At last the blue-taloned foreclaws tensed. The vorg scraped the floor of its cage, and then heaved itself forwards. It reached the horizontal bar under the open doorway of the cage and dragged itself slowly across the threshold, metal scraping against metal, until its abdomen, limbless hindquarters and tail were free of the cage. Then it halted, as if either exhausted or disorientated, or perhaps not quite believing its luck.

Quillon was still tense, still half-expecting to be shot at any moment, but he no longer considered the vorg to be the threat he had imagined. Forced to crawl on its belly, it was too slow to hurt anyone, provided they stayed out of reach of those foreclaws and snout-mechanisms. Little chance of it causing much mayhem, either. Perhaps the mere fact of its escape would be enough to undermine Ricasso, and to frame Quillon as a saboteur in whom Ricasso had foolishly placed his trust.

He was wrong about the vorg, though.

Perhaps its faculties had been dulled by the secretion process, or perhaps the sudden change in circumstances had forced it to truly
think
for the first time since its capture. Whatever the explanation, it was neither exhaustion nor the limitations of its anatomy that made the vorg move so slowly at first. The vorg did not gather speed; rather it exploded into motion as if a tightly wound spring had just been released. Perhaps the absence of its hindlimbs slowed it to a degree, but from Quillon’s standpoint it was difficult to imagine anything moving faster. The forelimbs worked in a blur, the claws achieving traction against the floor, biomechanical musculature hauling the rest of the creature forwards, the tail coiling and uncoiling behind, adding its own propulsive force. Out of the corner of his eye, Quillon saw the reaction in Spatha’s face: the dawning, stupefied realisation that he had set in motion something he couldn’t control. The vorg rocketed towards them, crashing through benches and equipment, its tail flicking obstacles aside with ostentatious disregard. And then it was on them, or at least ready to strike - Quillon and Spatha with their backs against the wall, Spatha aiming the gun at the looming monster but frozen into inaction, unable to decide whether shooting the vorg would help or hinder their predicament. For a long moment it crouched before them, taut, ready to pounce, its snout-mechanisms clicking and whirring with the anticipation of nourishment. Red and purple things bellowed and pulsed inside the chassis of its metal ribcage. Flies had already caught up with it, buzzing in and out through gaps in its body.

And then it was gone. The tail flicked past them as it left, cutting the air with a whipcrack, but it had touched neither of them. There was just the empty cage, the open door, the two men in the chaos that had once been a laboratory.

Spatha’s stasis of indecision lasted a few moments longer, and then his old self returned.

‘You wanted mayhem,’ Quillon said. ‘Looks like you’re going to get it.’

‘Turn around, Doctor.’

‘Are you going to kill me?’

He didn’t have to wait for an answer. Spatha took his gun by the barrel and smashed the butt against Quillon’s skull. Pain flowered between his eyes and he slumped to the floor.

Spatha couldn’t shoot him, of course. Quillon realised this as his mind cleared and the pain shifted from agonising to merely intensely unpleasant. He had not blacked out, or if he had it had only been for an instant, not long enough to interrupt his thoughts. No, he couldn’t be shot because that would place Spatha in the laboratory, and it had to look as if Quillon was the one who had released the vorg. Knocking him unconscious made it look as if he had been injured by the vorg’s escape, as if he had been the only one down there.

He forced himself to his feet, fighting throbbing waves of dizziness and nausea. Touched a hand to the side of his head where the gun had struck him, winced at the contact, but came away with his fingers dry rather than bloody. The skin had not been broken. He took slow, calming breaths, trying to shuffle his thoughts into order. Spatha was gone and the vorg was still out there.

Perhaps it was the pain, but he experienced a sudden unexpected clarity of perception. He understood now why he had been asked to steal the blue book. It had nothing to do with the book’s contents, which even Ricasso had considered valueless to his enemies. It had, instead, everything to do with what Quillon had done subsequently. He had informed Ricasso of the matter and by doing so had entered deeper into Ricasso’s confidence. Perhaps Ricasso would have allowed Quillon access to the laboratory without that gesture, but it had undoubtedly ushered the process along. And all of that had allowed Spatha to engineer the sabotaging of Ricasso’s experiments and make it look like Quillon’s handiwork. For a moment, he could only marvel at Spatha’s chicanery, and feel bitterly repulsed at the ease with which he had been manipulated.

The snake still has venom, Ricasso had said.

The fog was lifting from his mind. Forcing himself to act calmly, he looked around the laboratory, making sure he absorbed all the details. The other vorgs were stirring, but their cages remained secure and their nutrient lines were still delivering. He had no projectile weapon, but the axe was still on the wall. He took it, and this time adrenalin turned it paper-light in his hands. He wasn’t sure what good it would do but he felt better for it.

He grabbed his bag in his other hand, left the laboratory and made doubly sure that he had locked the door on his way out. The vorg could only have gone one way, which was through the storage rooms that connected the laboratory with the rest of
Purple Emperor’s
multilevel gondola. As he passed through the first room he saw nothing out of place, suggesting that the creature had taken the path of least resistance. He entered the second room and heard a voice, raised and anxious. In the darkness he made out Spatha. He was standing - leaning, rather - against a wall, with a speaking tube raised to his lips. ‘One of them’s escaped. It’s in the lower levels ... broken through the wall, into the service space. Get men down here now, before it reaches the rest of the gondola. Automatic weapons, everything. Repeat, a vorg is loose!’