World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (28 page)

“We’re cops,” Stegman replied. “What do you expect? We can’t carry anything else, not without special dispensation.”

“Yeah, well, I think under the circumstances you could do with something with a bit more stopping power. Something that gets an immediate, permanent result.”

Two of the Kobolds were armed with MPA pistols, a third with a bullet-firing handgun, another replica, this one a Ruger 9mm. Dev gathered up the weapons, along with any spare ammunition and charge packs he could find. None of the Kobolds was in any state to object.

“Here you go.”

He held the guns out to Stegman and Zagat.

“Can’t,” said Stegman. “Calder’s Edge statutes say –”

“Are we in Calder’s? No, we are not. Policing in Lidenbrock is a whole different ballgame. It isn’t law enforcement as you know it. Take the guns.”

Stegman was in a quandary.

Zagat, by contrast, grabbed one of the MPA pistols decisively. He checked the charge level, weighed the gun in his hand, aligned his eye along the sights.

“Doable,” he said.

“A man of few words, but his actions speak volumes,” said Dev. “Stegman?”

The sergeant hesitated a little longer.

“Why don’t you take an MPA too, like Zagat did? You won’t be wanting the Ruger. That’s a
man’s
gun.”

Stegman, predictably, grabbed the replica Ruger. “Only as a last resort,” he said.

“How about you, Trundle?”

Dev proffered the second MPA pistol to the xeno-entomologist, who vigorously shook his head.

“I’d only end up shooting my own toe off,” he said. “Or one of you.”

“Fair enough. Didn’t think you would.” Dev turned to Banerjee. “Other professor? What do you say?”

Banerjee took a moment before making up his mind and accepting the gun off Dev. “Very well. I’ve next to no experience with firearms but I’m sure I’ll manage.”

“Right, then,” Dev said. “Wagons roll.”

The group of five men slipped through the barricade and re-entered Lidenbrock City.

30

“W
HAT DID
T
ED
Jones do next?” Dev asked Banerjee.

“He – we – embarked on an exploration of the moleworms’ nesting grounds. This meant going deep down, dangerously deep. I would never normally have dared venture so far into the subterranean world, but Ted insisted, and what could I do but go along? We travelled light, carrying all we needed in backpacks – provisions, mostly. We descended slowly and carefully, acclimatising ourselves to the increasing heat. Potable water was our most precious resource, and we used closed-loop filtration bottles to keep ourselves hydrated.”

“You drank your own purified pee.”

“We recycled our urine, yes. What of it? It’s not so terrible. You get used to the taste.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to try it myself, if at all possible.”

“Moleworms, as you may be aware, keep their lairs in regions close to the mantle, where a human couldn’t survive for long,” said Banerjee. “They’re known to build nests higher up, however, in slightly cooler regions, for the purposes of giving birth and rearing their young. Ted and I surveyed a number of the breeding colonies. Eventually we zeroed in on a single nest where the parents seemed less than typically attentive.”

They passed the chained-up albino dog. Again it set up a ferocious barking, and this time the owner came out to see what was bothering it. When the animal wouldn’t respond to his demands for silence, he kicked it until it got the message. Then he fixed a bleary eye on Dev and the others.

“Who the fuck’re you people?” he mumbled, rummaging with one hand in the front of his pyjama bottoms, scratching his bare chest with the other. “Heard some gunfire back that-a-way just now. Anything to do with you?”

“None of your business,” said Stegman. “Go back inside.”

The dog owner flipped him a finger, gave the dog another kick for good measure, and shuffled back into his habitat, yawning hard.

“They had a brood of three,” Banerjee continued. “Two males and a female. They were neglectful parents. Usually one of a mating pair stays with the pups while the other is out hunting, but in this case both mother and father were happy to go off for hours at a time and leave their offspring to fend for themselves.”

“Jones kidnapped one, didn’t he?”

“I was dead set against the idea, but I was still under his sway. He talked me round. It went against everything I believed in, the whole ethos of zoology, which is to observe and make notes but never interfere. My desire to please Ted, though, was stronger than my scruples. We stole one of the males. His siblings tried to prevent us. They were only recently born, a few days old. Big as foxes, and as innately vicious. Ted shot them both dead. We carried off the male pup – sedated – and left the area as quickly as we could.”

“Didn’t the parents follow you?” Trundell asked. “They’d have been able to track the pup’s scent.”

“Ted thought of that. He poisoned the corpses of the other two pups, injecting them with a fast-acting lethal neurotoxin. The first thing the parent moleworms would have done when they returned to the nest would be eat the remains. Moleworms never turn up the opportunity of a free meal, even if it’s the corpses of their own children.”

Trundell made an appalled face. “That’s barbaric.”

“The eating-their-dead-kids or the poisoning?” said Dev.

“The poisoning, obviously.”

“Okay, thought so. Just checking where your values are at.”

“And you were complicit in it, professor,” Trundell said bitterly to Banerjee.

“Now you can understand my remorse,” Banerjee replied. “I violated a code of practice I had lived by all my life. At any rate, we escaped with the pup – and with our lives – and made our way back up to the environs of Lidenbrock. Ted returned to the city itself, leaving me with the task of hand-rearing the pup. That’s what I did – all I did – for the next year.”

“You brought up a baby moleworm,” Dev said.

“I kidded myself that it was a useful experiment, that I was learning at first hand about a moleworm’s very earliest stages of development. Really I was just doing Ted’s bidding. I caught scroaches and fed them to the pup in chunks.”

Trundell glowered at him again, but Banerjee seemed oblivious.

“Blindwarblers, too,” he said, “which he got a real taste for. I became a kind of wet nurse, forever filling his voracious, gaping maw. During the initial months it was a round-the-clock job. Feeding time was every four hours. It exhausted me.”

“On your own? Ted didn’t help?”

“He came by now and then to assess the pup’s progress. He brought me supplies when I ran low. For the most part, he left me to it, though.”

“Ever occur to you to ask what he wanted a moleworm for?”

“Often, and I did enquire, but always the answer was the same: ‘Never you mind.’ And Ted would look at me in a certain way, as if reminding me of the loyalty I felt for him, the debt I owed him. I quailed each time. Vividly I would recall how he had saved me and my family on numerous occasions. These were like actual memories of real events. They were all piled on top of one another, countless variations on a theme. I couldn’t separate them out, one from the next. They had all happened, as though I had led the most cursed, tragedy-filled life imagin –”

“Shh.”

Zagat, who had taken point, raised a hand. Everyone halted in their tracks.

They had come to a six-way crossroads. Catwalks lined a shaft that rose hundreds of metres overhead and bored an even greater distance downward. Footfalls and voices could be heard from the tunnel street to the left.

Zagat patted the air to indicate that the others should shrink back, making themselves unobtrusive. Dev tiptoed forward to join him at the junction. Together, he and Zagat peered surreptitiously round the corner.

A dozen Lidenbrockers were ambling towards them. They were young, none older than twenty. Old enough to be members of a gang, but were they Kobolds?

They joshed and bantered. As they reached the catwalk, one of the boys seized one of the girls from behind and pretended he was going to tip her over the handrail. She retaliated by slapping him in the groin, hard enough to elicit a torrent of anguished swearing. The rest all laughed. Horseplay.

The kids turned left, going off along the far tunnel.

“False alarm,” Dev informed Stegman, Trundell and Banerjee. “Not Kobolds. At least not as far as I can tell. A couple of them had tattoos, but I didn’t see any body modification.”

“With Lidenbrock gangs, it isn’t just about dress codes or insignia or suchlike,” said Banerjee. “They use commplant handshakes and proximity sensing. Their commplants beam out affiliation signals. That way, you can recognise another member of your own gang even if you don’t know the person by sight.”

“That’ll come in handy during a rumble. Help sort out friend from foe.” Dev pondered. “Hmm. Wonder if it’s possible to hack into their insite node and falsify affiliation signals for us so that we can pass ourselves off as Kobolds.”

“They’re well-encrypted, as I understand it. Do you have the programming skills?”

“Not me, but someone at ISS central office would. All I’d need would be a software patch from them. Trouble is, it’d take a couple of hours at least to arrive, and, as Sergeant Stegman is no doubt itching to point out, we don’t have that much time.”

“We certainly don’t,” said Stegman.

“Then on we go, as we are,” said Dev. “Which way, prof?”

Banerjee pointed right, and they padded round a section of catwalk and down the tunnel indicated.

“So,” Dev said, “you had your baby moleworm. You and Ted were his proud stepdads. How long did you keep him?”

“By year’s end, the pup was almost fully mature,” said Banerjee. “We’d stowed him in a small, narrow cave, a natural channel. It was a long-defunct lava tube, I believe. We’d bricked up the opening and installed a gate for us to go in and out through. The moleworm was chained up inside, and more or less docile. I would regularly sedate him and file down his claws so that he couldn’t dig his way out.”

“You’d tamed him.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. He was still a wild beast. But he had come to associate me with the bringing of food, and so he accepted my presence, tolerated me. I nevertheless made sure not to get too close to him. The larger he grew, the less predictable his moods were. A couple of times he made a lunge for me. Had I been slightly nearer, a fraction slower in reacting, who knows? I mightn’t be here to tell the tale.”

He sounded wistful, as though becoming dinner for his pet moleworm might have been preferable to living.

“It would have been poetic justice, at least,” he said. “A kind of bleak, fitting irony. Then the day came when Ted determined that the moleworm was ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“That I don’t know. Ted simply arrived and announced that he was taking him off my hands. He brought equipment with him.”

“What sort?”

“Can’t say for sure. Some of it looked medical, some technological. Hypodermics, phials of serum, a laser scalpel, electronic hardware. He told me my work was done and I should go. I think I may have protested, I’m not sure. If I did, it wasn’t strenuously. My lord and master had dismissed me. I went.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m surprised he didn’t kill you. You’d outlived your usefulness. Plussers don’t tend to be sentimental when it comes to humans. We’re a lower life form to them, all equally ugly and expendable.”

“I’ve wondered about that myself,” said Banerjee. “My assumption is he no longer considered me of any value at all, not even worth the trouble of killing. He’d got from me everything he required. I was superfluous after that, like the carton a takeaway meal comes in.”

“Still, you were a loose end, and loose ends need to be tied up.”

“He knew me. He knew that I would never be able to bring myself to tell anyone what I’d done, and also that I couldn’t go back to my old life. He had compromised me in every way – personally, professionally. Perhaps he got a thrill out of knowing that I was destroyed. Letting me live was crueller than ending my misery.”