World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (40 page)

“Or I’m just cynical.”

“Show me the union boss who isn’t. Yes, I want something. I want you – the pair of you – to help me fight back.”

Thorne and Konstantinov exchanged glances, both of them equally nonplussed.

“I want you,” Dev continued, “to put together an army. Thorne, I want you to rally the miners. Not just your Fair Dues Collective but all of the unions. Use the full force of your charm and charisma on them.”

“You what?” said Thorne. “An army?”

“And Konstantinov, I want you to sanction the use of Anoshkin equipment to arm this army. I want you also to recruit other mining companies – X-O-Geo, the one with the double-barrelled German name, all of them.”

“Heinkel-Junger, you mean?”

“That’s it. And the rest. Talk to your fellow execs. Use your connections, your clout. Get their consent for what I’m proposing. And I want you both to do it fast, as in yesterday. Because we really don’t have a lot of time.”

“Anoshkin equipment,” said Konstantinov. “You’re talking about...?”

“The digging and drilling exoskeleton rigs your workforce use. Normally a human being would be no match for a moleworm. But a human being in one of those rigs...”

“Let me get this straight,” said Thorne. “Pit folk fighting moleworms... with mining gear on?”

“It might seem crazy, but think about it. The rigs afford plenty of protection. Whoever’s inside is shielded by a steel roll cage and mesh grids so that they won’t be injured if a stray shard of rock flies at them. The arm attachments are six-inch-diameter drills, pickaxes, rotary saws, diamond-tipped cutters – the kind of sharp-edged implements that could really ruin a moleworm’s day. Those rigs are pretty much ideal under the circumstances. Without any alteration whatsoever, they can become mobile anti-moleworm attack suits.”

“But they’re not designed for that purpose, and miners have never used them for that purpose. You’re asking us to retask the tools of our trade and turn them into moleworm-killing machines. That’s like asking chefs to start throwing their carving knives at tigers.”

“As I’m sure any chef would, if the tiger was about to attack him, kill all his staff and ransack his kitchen. Or would you rather see Calder’s Edge destroyed and pit folk obliged to seek employment elsewhere? Assuming they survive, that is.”

“No,” said Thorne. “Of course not. It’s just...”

“I’m willing to give it a try,” said Konstantinov. “I’m reasonably certain I can clear it with the board of directors. And if not,” he added with a bold set of his jaw, “then I’m willing to face dismissal for going against their wishes. Mr Harmer makes a good case. We must fight back with whatever is at our disposal.”

“Easy for you to say, Konstantinov,” said Thorne. “You won’t be the one risking life and limb battling the moleworms. It’s us workers who will.”

“‘Us workers who will,’” Dev echoed. “Can I take that as meaning ‘Great idea, Dev, let’s do it’?”

“You can take it as meaning ‘Let me put it to the vote and see what my members say.’”

“Mention my name. That’s got to carry some weight with the FDC, after my sterling performance in the Ordeal.”

“I might do that,” said Thorne. “What’s certain is if I get the FDC on-side, other unions will follow. We’re that influential.”

“Which is why I asked you to this meeting, Thorne. You specifically. Apart from the fact that you grudgingly think I’m all right, you are the big cheese among Alighierian union leaders. The leader of leaders. You’re the one who can make this happen, and happen quickly.”

“Flattering bastard.”

“I know.”

“For the record,” said Graydon, “I’m not mad about your scheme, Harmer. Not at all. These aren’t trained combat troops we’re talking about. They’re ordinary Calder’s citizens. You’re putting them up against a horde of large, powerful predatory mammals. Some of them could die.
Lots
of them.”

“I’m well aware of that, Maurice. They’re not soldiers, no. But what they are is better than that. They won’t be fighting just for a day’s wages or because someone with stripes on their sleeve has ordered them to. They’ll be fighting to protect their homes, their jobs, their friends, their families, their city, their own lives. That’s the best army you can have, the one with everything to lose, the one that has a direct personal stake in winning. You can bet they’ll commit and do whatever it takes.”

“But,” said Kahlo, “we still have to get the moleworms to show themselves. So far they haven’t. It’s all been stealth attacks. Like you said earlier, Harmer, the entire planetary crust is their jungle. We can’t go chasing after them and hunting them down. It’d be hopeless.”

“No,” said Dev. “You’re right. So we have to change the game. Draw them out. And I think I know how to do that.”

43

“Y
OU LOOK EXHAUSTED,
Kahlo,” Dev said as Patrolman Utz drove them away from Graydon’s office.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Kahlo said. “It’s been chaos. I haven’t slept, haven’t stopped. I’m running on fumes. Only adrenaline and energy bars are keeping me going. You don’t look so hot yourself.”

“Hot? With these burns, surely that’s
all
I look like.”

“This irrepressible sense of humour of yours – you know it starts to wear thin after a while?”

“I recognise all the words in that sentence. I just don’t understand their meaning when they’re put together in that order.”

“Ugh,” said Kahlo, while Utz quietly sniggered.

The pod whirred through a beaten, battered, bruised Calder’s Edge. Debris from roof falls lay in unruly heaps. Column-based habitats had been shaken free from their moorings and gone tumbling to the cavern floor. Dev saw a raised rail track that was truncated abruptly in mid-air, several support pylons having collapsed along its course. A train had nosedived off the end and plunged a hundred metres onto a plaza below, where it now sat crumpled and curled like a dead snake.

Groups of people wandered through the devastated areas of the city, searching for missing loved ones. Their faces registered desolation, shock, and a kind of frantic hope.

Other groups were assembled in huddled knots, hugging, consoling one another.

Inevitably there were looters and rioters too, running rampant through the streets. Fear had sparked their basest impulses – to rob, to vandalise, to hurt others. Police were out in force to stop them, and Dev glimpsed skirmishes between law and disorder. Law, luckily, seemed to be winning.

Here and there, fires burned. Smoke billowed up to the cavern roof, gathering in a grim black pall. A priority for the emergency services was bringing the blazes under control before the cavern filled up with choking, toxic fumes.

“Hungry,” said Kahlo.

“Huh? You asking if I am, or telling me you are?”

“Both.”

“I am completely starving. But I doubt there’s anywhere to eat that’s open.”

“My place.”

“You cook?”

“No. I can do eggs, that’s about it. Interested?”

“I’m never one to turn down a free meal.”

“Utz, drop us off at West Nine Station. Then go home yourself. Grab an hour or two’s R and R. I’ll call when I need you again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In her habitat, Kahlo made scrambled eggs, adding a dash of chilli oil to give the dish savour. Dev wolfed down his helping as though he hadn’t eaten in days, washing it down with strong black coffee.

“Maybe it’s just the hunger talking,” he said when he had almost finished, “but this is the best-tasting eggs I’ve ever had. No, tell a lie. I knew a sergeant major who could rustle up a mean omelette. His trick was he never washed the frying pan. It got this kind of patina which he said enhanced the flavour. Mind you, during the war all food was good.”

“How’s that?”

“Any meal you ate meant you were still alive, so you valued it all the more.”

“You know, you still haven’t told me how you could have died at Leather Hill and yet here you are, eating eggs in my house.”

“That? Well... I probably shouldn’t. It’s covered by a non-disclosure agreement, and I could be prosecuted for leaking trade secrets.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, but what the fuck. You’re no blabbermouth. If you can’t trust a police chief...”

He set down his fork.

“It was late in the war, and a certain private security contractor was looking towards the future, to a time when either Polis Plus had been comprehensively trounced or a truce had been declared.”

“This was ISS?”

“They called themselves the Winter Consortium back then. Before the war, they’d provided armed escorts for celebrities and on-board security personnel for infraspace flights. Nothing major-league, but the company’s founder, Ulysses Winter, had ambition. Vision, some would say. He foresaw that TerCon might need a network of trained operatives to help keep the post-war peace – men and women who could be inserted quickly into potential trouble spots to help defuse powder kegs before they exploded.”

“And annoy the fuck out of local law enforcement while they’re about it.”

“That too,” said Dev. “Winter was well connected. He had extensive contacts within TerCon. He was able to secure substantial government investment, and he sank the money into research. He hired the best brainiacs he could and put them to work reverse-engineering Polis Plus technology scavenged from the battlefield. They figured out ways of growing entire clone bodies from small quantities of DNA and transferring complete consciousnesses in digitised form, just like the Plussers could.”

“Is that even legal, repurposing Plusser tech?”

“How should I know? You’re the cop. They did it anyway.”

“Okay, so how did
you
get involved?”

“I’m coming to that. Thing is, Winter was sneaky. He started recruiting for his prototype Interstellar Security Solutions before the war even ended, and he did that by pinpointing suitable candidates in advance and arranging to have their consciousnesses uploaded at the point of death. I can only assume the military top brass connived in this. Maybe bribes changed hands, who knows? At any rate, without my knowledge or say-so, I was singled out as one of those candidates.”

“You’d been decorated several times,” Kahlo said. “You had a good record. Guess that would have flagged you up to Winter.”

“Probably. Or it could just be that I was in the right place at the right time, in the right condition – near death but also close enough to a transcription matrix to be uploaded before I finally croaked. I figure Winter had ‘talent scouts’ loitering behind lines during the big campaigns, under orders to latch on to the fatally injured bodies of named individuals as and when they were medevac’ed back from the front. Whoever was at Leather Hill would have had his pick of goners to choose from. One of them just happened to be me.”

“So they... recorded your personality onto a hard drive?”

“Then zapped me off through ultraspace to ISS’s mainframe core on Earth. I don’t remember any of this clearly. Just impressions, fragments. Like something I might have dreamed.”

“And your body?”

“What’s left of it is buried on Barnesworld. Somewhere nice and green, I’m sure, hopefully with a view of rolling hills.”

“Shit,” said Kahlo with a shudder. “Not wishing to be unsympathetic, but that’s pretty creepy, isn’t it? Knowing your mortal remains are lying in the ground.”

“Tell me about it. Winter’s talent scout, his rep, whatever you like to call the guy, he also took cell samples off my mangled corpse. And that is why I’m now working for ISS.”

“How so? Wait, I get it. They’ve built you a new body. A new you. From scratch.”

“No, not yet. They’ve promised to. Host forms, however, are hideously expensive. I mean megabucks. The process takes time, energy, resources. It’s not like growing slabs of beef in a vat. If I want to be put into a brand spanking new me, I’ll have to earn it, and I earn it by carrying out missions for ISS. I store up credit with every successful outcome, according to a points system so arcane I’m not sure
anyone
understands it, least of all me. Once I hit the required total – one thousand points – I’ll have worked off my indenture. ISS will make a Dev Harmer host form and plonk me inside, and I get to carry on living as before.”