World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (42 page)

Someone in Calder’s Edge was a Polis+ agent, Ted Jones’s partner in crime. Someone had sent that freight shuttle after the police pod and carried out the malware attack on
Milady Frog
.

Someone, too, had alerted Ted Jones to Dev’s arrival at the ISS outpost, leading Jones to try to kill him by dropping a ton of rock on the building.

Kahlo had laid out the facts the first time they’d visited Graydon. How many people, she had asked, had known Dev was coming? A few of the Calder’s Edge higher-ups, that was all.

The assumption was that the Plussers had hacked communiqués between Alighieri and ISS central office, or perhaps one of Graydon’s own internal memos. Which was by no means impossible.

But what if Jones’s co-conspirator was actually a prominent Alighierian? Not a Plusser infiltrator at all, but a human collaborator? A traitor?

Nobody in their right mind would side with Polis+. How would it benefit you? What would you gain?

You could be brainwashed into it, however, as Professor Banerjee had been. Hypnagogic exposure had turned the zoologist into a loyal little quisling, utterly obedient to Jones’s bidding, even though, deep down, he knew he was being used and hated it.

Had Jones hypnexed someone else? Someone in Calder’s? Someone in a position of great responsibility, with access to secure servers and privileged information?

Someone like Governor Maurice Graydon?

No. It was Graydon who had put in a request for ISS intervention in the first place. Why would a Plusser thrall send for an operative from an organisation dedicated to countering covert Plusser activity?

Because Graydon had had to. As governor, he couldn’t have done otherwise. It would have seemed strange if he had failed to bring ISS in. It would have been a suspicious dereliction of duty.

And of course, the ISS agent – Dev – was supposed to have been killed as soon as he arrived, meaning Graydon would be seen to have done the right thing, discharged his gubernatorial obligation, only to have been thwarted by an unfortunate turn of events. Talk about having your cake and eating it.

Nobody was close to Graydon, not even his daughter. If he had had his will subverted by Jones, who would notice? Who knew him intimately enough to perceive anything different about him, any significant alteration in his personality or behaviour? No one. To all and sundry, he would still be the perfect, smiling, gracious governor of Calder’s Edge.

Politicians. They were what they seemed to be, the image they projected, and nothing more. Ted Jones, if Graydon was his stooge, had picked well.

With trepidation and a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, Dev returned to the bedroom.

Kahlo was getting dressed. “Anoshkin Energiya have given Konstantinov the go-ahead. Their rigs are at our disposal. The other mining conglomerates are in, too. We’re just waiting for absolute final word from a couple of directors, and we’re good to go.”

“Anything from Thorne yet?”

“No, but Konstantinov has been in touch with him and says he’s received what he calls ‘encouraging noises.’”

“Great. That’s great.”

Kahlo paused while clipping her bra in place. “It looks like you’re getting your weapons and your army. Why the long face?”

“Kahlo. Astrid. We need to talk...”

45

F
ROM THE RAISED
esplanade in front of the CEPD headquarters, Dev looked out over Calder’s Edge.

This was where it had started.This was where it was going to end.

Hours of frantic preparation and organisation had passed. There had been times when it seemed there was too much to do and no hope of accomplishing it before Ted Jones returned from Xanadu to finish what he had begun.

The denizens of Calder’s Edge, however, had been remarkably cooperative. Once it had become clear to them that there was a plan of action – that something
practical
could be done to save their city – they pulled together. They shook off their frenzies of grief and despair and anger. The sporadic rioting died down; the looters stopped looting. Word spread. There was going to be a fightback, a resistance, and everyone had a part to play.

The youngest and oldest residents were moved to the industrial zones and shopping malls, along with the sick and the frail, and sequestered there inside sturdy buildings. Groups of able-bodied citizens were appointed as their guardians to ensure that they were kept fed, watered and comfortable. Police set up armed cordons, an extra line of defence against what was coming. Everyone else retired to their homes and battened down the hatches.

At the same time, miners retrieved rigs from tunnels, loading them onto trains to be transported to the city. They came marching out of the rail stations one after another in lines: drillers, cutters, blasters, pounders, carriers. Eight-foot-tall mechanised exoskeletons, each housing a driver who manipulated the rig with practised precision, as though it were an extension of his or her own body. They strode along the streets with strange metallic delicacy, the clang of their steel footfalls resounding to the roof like peals of bells.

There were a couple of thousand of them all told, and they mustered at prearranged rendezvous sites – junctions, crossroads, bottlenecks, pinch points. Dev and Kahlo had pored over a map of Calder’s, identifying the ideal spots to deploy their forces, the places where the moleworms could only attack one at a time and where they might be trapped and surrounded.

Thorne had helped with the marshalling of the rig drivers. He had assigned a Fair Dues Collective member to take charge of each of the disparate ‘pit folk platoons,’ and stayed connected with them via an open comms link. He circulated the instructions Dev and Kahlo provided, acting as a kind of halfway house between commanders and commanded. The miners took orders better from him than from a police chief and an ISS operative.

Dev, from his vantage point, could see several of the groups of rigs, stationed at their positions. Mechanics attended to them, conducting last-minute diagnostic checks on the servos and microprocessors and making sure that batteries were charged and tools were functioning at full efficiency.

The city was quiet, eerily so. Very little moved. It seemed as though the entire vast cavern was holding its breath, waiting.

Harmer?

Trundle.

The xeno-entomologist was presently in the rail network control room. When Dev had conferred with him in person a short while earlier, Trundell was still visibly suffering from the after-effects of his near-immolation on the surface. His singed skin was lathered in ointment and clumps of his hair had shrivelled down to stubble. He looked unwell and ought to have been recuperating in bed, but had stalwartly come running in response to Dev’s request for help. “Just tell me what I can do,” he had said. “Anything at all.”

I’ve pulled up all the relevant sound files I’ve made, Trundell said now, and patched them into the rail network’s automated announcement system. The guys here say everything’s ready. Punch of a button and we’re good to go.

Great stuff. Hang fire. Not until I give the word.

Dev looked around at Kahlo and Thorne, who were with him on the esplanade.

“Trundell’s all set. Our troops are in place. Now’s the time for someone to tell me this is a batshit crazy idea.”

“It
is
a batshit crazy idea,” said Thorne, “but it’s also the only one we’ve got.”

“And your people, they’re clear about what they’re facing, what’s expected of them?”

“They are. These are tough men and women; they don’t scare easily. Already I’ve heard a few of them saying they’re relishing the prospect of battling moleys. You’ve got folks down there who have lost friends and relatives in this last round of earthquakes. They’re looking forward to a bit of payback.”

“As long as the moleworms come out where we can get them,” Kahlo said. “That’s the big
if
, isn’t it?”

Dev glanced towards the immense rock arch which was home to Governor Graydon’s office. That was the direction Kahlo was gazing in too.

He knew what she was thinking. There was another big
if
that was preoccupying her.

“I should arrest him,” she said softly, coldly, like snow. “Go right over there and bust him. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Without conclusive proof, what would be the use? He’s going to show his cards, if he has any to show, when we start wiping out Jones’s moleworm army. Until then, patience. At least we didn’t tell him everything. Such as how, for instance, we’re hoping to winkle the moleworms out of hiding. So he can’t forewarn Jones about that.”

“What’s this?” said Thorne. “Who are you talking about?”

“No one,” Dev said. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get on with this, eh? No point putting it off any longer. Thorne, tell your people to brace themselves. I’m giving Trundle the green light. Once it all starts happening, it’s probably going to happen fast.”

Thorne nodded and passed on the warning.

Trundle?

Yes, Harmer?

Do it.

Half a minute went by. A minute.

Nothing.

Dev was about to ask Trundell whether something had gone wrong.

Then he heard it, emanating from the speakers at every single one of Calder’s Edge’s rail stations.

A hissing.

The rattly, scratchy hiss of scroaches.

Hungry scroaches.

Panicked scroaches.

Randy scroaches.

Angry scroaches.

Scroaches of every age and gender, in every kind of mood.

Loud.

The sound rolled out across the cavern in waves, filling the streets and the wide open spaces.

Trundell had made countless recordings of scroach hissing during the course of his studies. He had been endeavouring to understand their language, to ‘decode the syntax’ as he had told Dev down in the geode maze.

Now every sound file he had compiled was playing on a loop, simultaneously, and it was as though there were hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of scroaches in the cavern. More scroaches than you would ever normally find together in one location.

Banerjee had boasted how he and Jones had trapped that moleworm near Lidenbrock, luring it with the hisses from a captive scroach.

Dev was doing the same here, but on a considerably larger scale.

He was ringing the dinner bell for Jones’s horde of moleworms.

“Grub’s up, you bastards,” he murmured. “You know you want it. You can’t resist. This has got to sound like an all-you-can-eat buffet to you. Come and get it.”

46

F
OR FIVE MINUTES,
the scroach hissing resounded through the cavern.

Ten minutes.

Dev’s doubts deepened. What if he had miscalculated? What if the moleworms could tell the difference between recorded scroach hissing and the real thing? What if Ted Jones knew it was a trap and was holding his moleworm army back?