World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (25 page)

“Tough crowd,” Dev murmured.

His commplant pinged. They were within a couple of kilometres of the nearest of Banerjee’s hides.

Habitats were fewer in number here, scattered. The tunnels were narrower, with lower ceilings. Detritus lay in heaps, as though trash kept getting shoved further and further outward to the city’s edges where there weren’t as many people around to see it.

The city outskirts. The badlands.

An albino dog on a chain barked at the four-man group as they went by: a mangy creature, skin a mass of sores, no breed and every breed. It strained at its tether, half throttling itself in its eagerness to attack. A sleep-slurred voice yelled at it from indoors – “Shurrup!” – but the dog didn’t stop barking until Dev and company were well out of sight.

Five hundred metres to destination, Dev’s commplant said in its neutral voice.

Dev relayed the information to the others.

They came to a crude barricade that had been set up across the tunnel. It was built from scrap metal, sticks of old furniture and husks of waste tech, with here and there a cushion or rug plugging a gap. Spent shell casings littered the floor in front of it, alongside empty beer cans.

On one wall someone had scrawled in spray paint:

On another wall there were badly drawn caricatures of moleworms, all snaggle teeth and snaky nasotentacles. Several were depicted on their backs, legs in the air, crosses for eyes, riddled with bullet holes. One had a speech bubble coming from its mouth: “
u r a good shot u of killd me ded.
”

“Line of control,” Dev said. “This would have been manned round the clock, back when there were moleworms to worry about. Now people have stopped bothering. See how much rust there is on those shell casings? It’s been months since anyone fired a gun here.”

The barricade had not been well maintained. Dev and Zagat only had to heave aside a mattress, and a whole section of the ramshackle structure simply gave way. Echoes of the collapse resounded down the tunnel beyond.

“Well, if there are still moleworms around, they know we’re coming,” Stegman groused.

“To think Sunil Banerjee himself came this way,” said Trundell as they filed through the gap in the barricade. “The Lidenbrockers must have thought he was crazy.”

“Probably they admired him,” said Dev. “Crazy for them is like genius for you academics.”

Two hundred and fifty metres, said Dev’s commplant.

Moleworm bones were scattered on the tunnel floor. Some, Dev noticed as he stepped over them, showed gnaw marks. He guessed other moleworms had scavenged the flesh off their fallen kin.

The supposition was borne out by the various piles of dried-up dung that accompanied the bones. These brittle, mould-wreathed mounds were now host to colonies of pale, pulpy termite-like insects which Trundell identified as
Isoptera coprophagia alighieriensis
.

“Commonly known as ordure ants, more vulgarly known as shittermites. They make their nests in moleworm excreta, which they live on until there’s none left, and then they move on.”

“They eat themselves out of house and home,” said Dev.

“In a manner of speaking. But don’t tread on the dung piles if you can help it, because ordure ants respond to a perceived attack in force. Their mandibles are a centimetre long and razor sharp. You’ll know if one bites you, and it’s more likely to be a hundred of them at once.”

“Gotcha. Don’t step in poop. Duly noted.”

One hundred metres.

Residual light from beyond the barricade was waning. The tunnel floor was uneven, the tunnel itself full of haphazard twists and turns. Dug by moleworm rather than man.

Trundell produced a flashlight, warning the others to look away before he switched it on.

Even through closed eyelids, Dev found the sudden burst of brilliance dazzling, painfully so. It took his Alighierian vision a full minute to adjust.

Trundell trained the flashlight around. The beam fell on a ledge some ten feet up, illuminating a flock of squirming winged things that flitted away into the darkness.

“Bats?” said Dev.

“Birds, actually. Blindwarblers. Harmless. Ordure ants are their staple food. Banerjee mentioned them. ‘A pest,’ he said, ‘but if cooked, palatable.’”

“Don’t tell me. They taste like chicken.”

“Pigeon, I think he said.”

“He went kind of native, didn’t he?”

“Eating bushmeat is common practice for a zoologist in the field. And there.”

The flashlight picked out a hemispherical shape ahead.

“That’ll be the hide.”

27

T
HE HIDE WAS
a dome made up of triangular panels, essentially a self-assembly, flat-bottomed polyhedron, just tall enough at its summit for a person to stand up in. Most of the panels were opaque, a few transparent, and all made of lightweight reinforced acrylic. Their edges were lined with covalent smart-bond strips. Once pressed together, the strips formed a solid, airtight seal which could be undone later, when the hide needed dismantling, by the application of an electric current from a special wand.

The structure was intact, though covered in a thick encrustation of blindwarbler droppings like some sort of lumpy icecap. The guano obscured the transparent panels, making it impossible to look in through them. It gave off an eye-wateringly acrid smell.

Dev located the entrance, a hatch at the base. It was code-locked.

No time for niceties. He took out the hiss gun and punched a hole through the latch, disabling it. Then he kicked until the latch broke and the hatch swung inward.

A stench wafted out of the hide, mustier than the guano but no less pungent. Dev recoiled, nose wrinkling.

“Ugh. Hobo reek. Someone’s camping in there. Someone with poor hygiene and presumably no sense of smell.”

Trundell tried to peer in, but the stench proved too much for him. “That’s rancid.”

“Who’s going inside to take a look?”

“You are, Harmer,” said Stegman. “You’re in charge of this expedition, aren’t you? You’re acting like it, anyway. So you take the lead.”

“I thought Kahlo sent you along to keep an eye on me. Doesn’t that make you the man in charge?”

“I’m supervising, yes, but you’re the one calling the shots.” Stegman, gleeful, made an ushering gesture in the direction of the hatch. “All yours,
sir
.”

Dev slipped off his undershirt and knotted it around the lower half of his face. On hands and knees, he crawled into the foetid hide.

Inside, a sleeping bag lay in a messy pile, surrounded by archipelagos of soiled clothing, including filthy underwear and brittle socks. A camping stove with an induction hob stood sentinel over a stainless steel cooking pot. The floor around it was heaped with tiny, porous bones, many with shreds of flesh and gristle still attached.

The smell began to get to him even through the bunched fabric of the undershirt. He retreated back out into the tunnel.

“It’s so horrible in there, I can’t even crack a joke,” he said.

“What did you find?” asked Trundell.

“Somebody’s claimed squatters’ rights. He’s been living off locally sourced meat. I found what look like bird bones, most likely blindwarbler.”

“Who do you think it might be?”

“Some sort of Lidenbrocker reject, that’d be my guess,” said Dev, “though what you’d have to
do
to get kicked out of Lidenbrock City – the mind boggles. It could, I suppose, be someone who’s fallen out with one or other of the gangs and who’s lying low until the heat dies down. Question remains – how did he get into the hide? There was no sign of forced entry, at least not until I came along and forced entry. He’d have to know the access code, whoever he is.”

“What if it’s a zoologist? Banerjee would have made the code available on request through the proper academic channels.”

“I suppose. I’d have thought a scientist would be a little tidier and more considerate than that, though. Not leave food scraps and crusty clothing all over the place.”

“Where’s this getting us?” Stegman said. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be heading back to the arcjet soon. Lidenbrock’s going to be crawling with angry Kobolds before long, if it isn’t already.”

“We try another of the hides,” Dev said. “I was hoping for some handwritten notes, stuff recorded on an external drive, something along those lines. If there was any of that at this hide, the current resident appears to have tossed it out. The next hide is about –”

“Movement.”

This was from the laconic Zagat. He had been keeping lookout while Dev checked out the hide. The single murmured word brought silence and tension.

Dev snatched the flashlight from Trundell and aimed it in the direction Zagat was staring, deeper into the tunnel.

Something – someone – darted away from the beam. Dev caught a glimpse of ragged clothing and round, spooked eyes.

Without hesitation, Dev hared off along the tunnel. The flashlight beam bounced as he ran.

The figure ahead of him was running too, but with an awkward gait. Whoever it was kept tripping and once even collided with the tunnel wall. Dev quickly gained ground until he was within grabbing distance.

He dived, tackling his quarry to the floor. He caught a whiff of unwashed body and of fabric permeated with the same stale aroma as the interior of the hide. He insinuated an arm around the person’s neck from behind, locking the hand into the crook of his other arm to reinforce the chokehold.

His victim writhed, but Dev applied pressure. He heard gasping and wheezing.

“Let’s do this the easy way,” he said. “You relax, don’t resist, I don’t asphyxiate you. Got that?”

Frantic nodding.

“I’ll ease off now. We both stand up. Any funny business, I tighten my grip again. I can make you black out if I’m feeling kind. I can also keep the hold going until the blood supply to your brain is stopped long enough to be fatal. I’d like not to have to do that. I’ve got no beef with you. I just want to talk, that’s all. Okay?”

More nodding.

“Okay. Good. Up we go.”

They clambered upright together. Dev swung the man round – the person
was
male, he could feel coarse, bushy beard against his forearm – and frogmarched him over to the hide.

“Think we’ve found our squatter,” he said. “Maybe he can tell us if Banerjee left anything useful in there.”

Trundell was agog.

“What?” said Dev.

“I– I think he can do better than that, Harmer.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“That isn’t any squatter,” Trundell said in slow, amazed tones. “That’s Professor Banerjee.”