World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (23 page)

Dev could see the situation getting out of hand, unless someone acted to resolve it more forcefully and less mollifyingly than Beauregard. Trundell could react to Harvey’s bullying in one of two ways. Either he put up with it, and Harvey would regard that as a sign of weakness and inevitably escalate the verbal abuse to physical. Or he would snap back with some waspish retort, which Harvey would use as the perfect excuse to lose his temper. Both scenarios were destined to end in violence, and an injured Ludlow Trundell.

Time to intervene.

“Harvey, yeah? Is that your name?” Dev said.

The Lidenbrocker turned his reptilian eyes on Dev. “And who the fuck are you?”

Dev rabbit-punched him in the mouth, hard enough to shatter several of those serrated fangs.

Harvey went down, spitting blood and splinters of dentine.

“Oh, I forgot to introduce myself,” Dev said. “I’m the man who’s going to hit you. Should have said that first, shouldn’t I?”

As one, the remaining Lidenbrockers drew their guns and knives. Weaponry clattered and bristled. The air was filled with the clicking of cocked hammers and the hum of power cells charging up.

“No!” cried Beauregard. “There’s no call for this. No, no, no. Everyone calm down. Put those things away. We can sort it out. How much? My passengers can pay. How much do you need?”

The Lidenbrockers weren’t listening. They spread out in a line, moving to flank Dev and the others on both sides.

Stegman was glaring at Dev –
now look what you’ve gone and done
– whereas Zagat was concentrating on the Lidenbrockers, marking their relative positions, assessing the level of threat each posed. The deputy hadn’t said two words since boarding
Milady Frog
but, judging by his cool composure now, Dev had the impression he would be handy in a fight.

Good. Because it looked like it was going to come to that.

“We don’t want trouble,” Dev said.

“Should’ve thought of that before you decked Harvey,” said a Lidenbrocker with pointed ears and subdermal implants which gave his face a batlike cast.

“He got in too close. He was picking on my friend. We just want to be allowed to conduct our business. Beauregard’s right – we’ll pay for our passports or excise duty or whatever you like to call it.”

“Problem is,” said Batface, “Harvey’s a Kobold. We’re all Kobolds. Hit one of us and you’re hitting us all.”

The Kobolds were one of the many gangs who held sway in the city. They were in fact one of the largest and most powerful, controlling an extensive area of turf across Lidenbrock’s lower northern reaches.

“I respect that,” Dev said. “Tribal loyalty. Blood brotherhood. All very noble. But dick behaviour is still dick behaviour. Your pal Harvey was giving one of my team grief. You’d have done the same in my shoes.”

He thought he was getting through to them. Gangsters or not, these men surely had a code of honour.

“Harvey was being kind of a douche,” one said.

“Yeah,” said another. “That offworlder’s pretty pussy-looking. Trust Harvey to go for the runt when there’s all these bruisers standing around.”

Harvey, through pain and shattered teeth, moaned something about how he didn’t like being talked down to by eggheads who thought they were smarter than everyone else. It was insulting.

“So shall we settle this amicably?” Dev said. “You name a figure, we’ll try and meet it, everyone goes away happy and content. Yeah?”

Batface looked around at his comrades, and slowly nodded. “Reckon that could work. Price has gone up, though. Due to unforeseen circumstances. What do you say to double the going rate?”

Dev swiftly checked the balance of his ISS slush fund. What Batface was asking for would all but wipe it out. Didn’t matter. He could always put in a request for extra contingency money. Deep-pocketed ISS usually came through with the readies when asked.

“Deal.”

With that, the tension in the docking bay was defused and the standoff was over. The Kobolds stowed their weapons. They seemed to feel they had done a good day’s work, their successful act of extortion giving them a warm glow inside. Batface even directed a smile Dev’s way.

Then Harvey Horns rose to his feet with a furious growl and made a lunge for Dev.

And everything went to shit again.

25

H
ARVEY HAD PRODUCED
a shimmerknife from inside his boot. An amplified piezoelectric actuator in the hilt sent ultrasonic waves through the six-inch carbon steel blade, making it vibrate at such a rate that it could literally carve through stone. The blade, when activated, became a sabre-shaped blur, as though you were seeing it through frosted glass.

The shimmerknife buzzed through the air in Harvey’s hand like an angry hornet. It was aimed at Dev’s head. Barely in the nick of time, Dev brought up a fist and blocked the strike, deflecting Harvey’s arm. The knife shaved a straight line through his hair, missing his scalp by millimetres.

Harvey pivoted, and Dev pivoted too. The Kobold’s lips and chin were smeared with blood, a crimson goatee. He was hurting, and he was livid.

He was also clumsy.

The next knife strike came in from the side, Harvey delivering the blow backhand at Dev’s throat. Dev reared back and the shimmerknife whistled past.

The thrust left Harvey momentarily off-balance, and Dev took advantage by seizing his knife arm. Holding the wrist with one hand, he pulled hard, at the same time driving the heel of his other hand into the side of Harvey’s elbow.

The hinge joint snapped laterally, loudly.

Harvey’s mouth gaped in a soundless rictus scream, revealing the reddened ruins of his teeth.

Dev added insult to injury by twisting the Kobold’s forearm so that the broken ends of the elbow grated together.

The shimmerknife fell to the floor point first, embedding itself in the concrete up to the hilt guard.

Harvey fell too, passing out from pain.

All this had taken no more than five seconds, but already the other Kobolds were going into action, drawing their weapons again. It was pack instinct as much as anything. If one of their number went on the offensive, then whatever the reason, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the rest of them must too. Group solidarity first and foremost.

Deputy Zagat, however, was also on the move. The moment Harvey went for Dev, Zagat had seen where things were headed. He grabbed hold of the nearest Kobold from behind and kneed the man so hard in the base of the spine, and so accurately, that he was numbed from the waist down. The Kobold collapsed as though his lower half was boneless jelly.

Next instant, the big deputy had another of the Kobolds by the wrists. He spun the Lidenbrocker round and round like an Olympic hammer thrower until the man’s feet left the ground. Then he let go. The Kobold sailed across the docking bay, spinning, until he slammed headlong into a stack of plastic cargo crates.

He didn’t get up again.

Dev darted towards Batface, pulling out his hair-splitter knife as he went. The hair-splitter was to all intents and purposes a basic close-combat weapon, but its edge was honed to molecule-fine sharpness by an array of self-arranging nanowires embedded in its stellite alloy blade. Not only could it cut a hair in half down the middle, as the name suggested, but it could slice into any material short of diamond. Hence, its sheath was made from synthetic diamond.

Batface had a repro classic pistol in his hand, a fully working replica Glock 9mm of the type carried by old-school Terran street hoods. Gold-plated, too, for extra corniness.

He pointed the Glock at Dev.

A moment later, he was holding only the grip of a pistol. The barrel, just forward of the trigger guard, had been lopped cleanly off. An unfired bullet tumbled out of the breech.

Batface registered shock and dismay. “Oh, man. That thing cost a buttload.”

“And now get a load of its butt,” said Dev as he snatched the rear half of the gun out of Batface’s grasp with his free hand and clubbed him on the head with it.

He kept clubbing until Batface was down and out.

Stegman was grappling with one of the female ‘customs officers.’ The third joints of the fingers on each of her hands were locked together by an implanted brass ridge – a permanent, irremoveable knuckleduster. Stegman was trying to control her fists so that she couldn’t land a blow.

Dev drew his hiss gun and shot the woman in the shoulder with a pencil-thin spike of ultra-compressed air. It went straight through her deltoid and scapula like an invisible lance, sending a spray of muscle and bone shards spiralling out behind her.

The sheer shock of the injury stopped her in her tracks. Stegman punched her out while she was stunned. He acknowledged Dev’s assist with a cursory tip of the head.

Shots rang out, and Dev spun. Another of the Kobolds had a ballistic handgun; this one a magnetic projectile accelerator pistol. Barbed steel flechettes raked the floor at Dev’s feet.

Dev returned fire with the hiss gun, and the Kobold panicked and bolted for cover. He kept shooting as he ran, but he was barely looking where he was aiming, just pulling the MPA pistol’s trigger wildly. One flechette took out a fellow Kobold, ripping a hole through the man’s flank.

Amateur.

He found refuge behind a support pillar. He leaned round and loosed off a few more flechettes in Dev’s direction.

Dev pinned him back behind the pillar with a couple of well-placed shots. The hiss gun drilled neat holes in the concrete, but didn’t have the penetrating power to go all the way through.

A nano-frag mine, on the other hand...

Dev primed the disc-shaped mine and sent it skittering across the floor. It fetched up against the foot of the pillar, anchored itself with a squirt of molecular glue, and detonated.

A small cloud of omnivorous nanites burst out and immediately began devouring everything they came into contact with, including the mine that had birthed them. They ate through floor and pillar like a swarm of submicroscopic locusts, reducing solid structures to dust in the blink of an eye.

Dev had set the mine for three seconds’ duration. When the time elapsed, the nanites self-destructed simultaneously, becoming inert particles of dust themselves.

Now the Kobold was cowering behind a pillar whose lower portion had been corroded away to a thin spindle, affording him no shelter. The rest of the pillar hung from the ceiling like a stalactite. Precarious and unable to bear its own weight, it crumbled and fell with an almighty
crunch
.

The Kobold sprang out of the way in order to avoid being crushed...

...and straight into reach of Dev’s fists.

Deputy Zagat polished off the two remaining Kobolds by pounding their heads together. He dropped them to the ground, both unconscious, and brushed his palms against each other as though they were caked in dirt.

“Tidy,” was all he said.

“Well, that could have gone better,” said Beauregard. When the fighting broke out, he had scuttled up the loading ramp to the safety of
Milady Frog
. Now he came back down, surveying the injured and insensible Kobolds littering the docking bay. “I had the situation in hand. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t hit Harvey.”

“Me?” said Dev. “This is my fault? He wasn’t going to leave Trundle alone. They respect toughness, you said. So I got tough.”

“For what it’s worth, I agree,” said Trundell, blinking rapidly. He looked shaken by the violence and bloodshed, but his voice had firmness. “I only wish there’d been someone like Harmer around when I was at school. Then I’d have spent less time with my head getting flushed in the toilet. And that was just the girls.”

Dev laughed. “I think Stegman can relate.”

“Screw you, Harmer,” said Stegman.

“Weren’t you having lady troubles just now?” Dev indicated the Kobold with the metal knuckles. “Maybe you like your women knocking you around a bit. You work for a real ballbreaker, after all.”

“Seriously, Harmer. Screw. You.”

“Not that I blame you. There’s something incredibly attractive about a woman who can kick butt. You get the feeling she’d be a wildcat in the sack.”