Xenoform (6 page)

Whistler drove the van around back to the car park and stopped smoothly in a space. The other vehicles were mostly brightly coloured gravpods, some of them heavily modified into boy-racer machines. A vulgar purple ground-trike squatted in their midst like a monster. The van was like a negative image amongst these bright toys. A holo-construct in the form of a huge silver-green fish swam through the sky above the club.

‘Pharmacopia?’ mused Roberts, scratching his stubbled chin. ‘Why a fish?’

‘Beats me,’ boomed Spider, unplugging from the vehicle. ‘I’ve told the van not to kill anyone,’ he informed the others.

‘Good,’ replied Whistler, leaving her seat.

‘Fun time,’ said Sofi with all the enthusiasm of one about to undergo dental surgery.

‘Try to cheer the fuck up, eh?’ suggested Spider, punching her on the shoulder as she bent to open the door of the van. She kicked back at him, quite effectively for someone in her unbalanced position, not bothering to check the results, and exited the vehicle. The others disembarked after her, Spider rubbing his leg and grinning.

The harvesters milled about for a moment, checking and stowing items of equipment. They looked like any other group of clubbers preparing to go in. A party of four – two men and two women – passed them, returning to their own vehicle. One of the men, wearing a ridiculous outfit of buckled rubber straps, sported a large, ruby red crab’s claw for a hand. His face was ugly with designer pockmarks but his scrawniness looked natural. The team watched him as inconspicuously as they could, Tec starting to roll a joint as he stood.

‘Nah,’ said Whistler. ‘Claw’s okay, but the rest of him doesn’t look worth much.’ There was general consensus. The four club-leavers got into their gravpod and it moved slowly away.

‘Come on, then,’ said Whistler and the others followed her around the side of the building towards the front.

They approached the bouncers, Whistler at the head of the group. The two men were bent together, sharing dabs of bright blue powder out of a paper wrap. They looked up as the harvesters neared them, one of them stowing the wrap about his person again. This man, a giant with rows of chrome spikes along the backs of his arms, hands and neck, put out one hand to stop the group.

‘Any illegal weapons?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m good, thanks,’ answered Whistler brightly, sauntering right past him.

A look of astonishment flashed across his square face and was replaced almost at once by a grim expression. One huge hand shot out to grab Whistler by her retreating shoulder. Anticipating it, she spun around, deflecting the hand in one motion, and stood staring the huge man directly in the eye – passive again, hands lowered. The bouncer’s hand returned slowly to his body and his lip curled slightly. His eyes were like storm clouds – a dark and thundery grey. His friend had one hand on a baton at his belt and was regarding Whistler with simple interest. Her posture was non-confrontational but she could see the subtle tensions in the bodies of her group as they watched. Tec’s head was glowing with a murderous deep purple.

‘Relax,’ she said charmingly. ‘Just stunners an’ shit.’ She was agonizingly aware of the smartgun hanging heavily in one jacket pocket, its evil little mind even now monitoring possible targets, listening for stress in voices, harbingers of violence.

There was a moment when the possibilities seemed to hang in equilibrium. Then the bouncer nodded, Whistler smiled disarmingly, and the five harvesters passed between the doormen and into the club. They walked through a sound-cancellation chamber and the music hit them like a wave.

The club was dimly-lit by the hectic glow of holo-construct women who danced amongst the clubbers like human lanterns, the colours blazing from them changing quickly in time with the music. Sometimes they flared with different shades, sometimes the colours came together and synched for a while. Real people were dancing with some of them, flesh and force field moving as if one.

The bar was a boomerang-shaped swathe of glass on a suspensor cushion. Drinks stood solidly on what appeared to be only a green nimbus of light. A robot like a golden octopus was serving several drinks at once. People paid by inserting cards into its palms, having money automatically transferred over the net if they were buttonheads, or handing over hard money if they were of the type who liked to be hard to trace. They were crammed three-deep at the bar, clamouring for the machine’s attention.

The dance floor was about a centimetre deep in black water. Occasionally, showers of dry ice pellets shot from the walls between the legs of the dancers, where they twisted and twirled as they sublimed in the water, dappled with pinprick laser lights. Some sort of machine was swooping around in the shadows near the ceiling – something quite big with wings. On a high balcony, revellers sloshed drinks down onto the dance floor as they thrashed along to the music.

In a bat-winged plastic pulpit, the DJ was deep in the vibe. He was playing a sustained sinistro bassline on one deck, trimming and EQ-ing by DNI, dropping in hypnophone screams and wavering electric howls from the other. His tattooed torso was studded with implanted diamonds.

‘Not as bad as when I was here last, actually,’ opined Whistler to Roberts, leaning in close to be heard over the noise.

‘I’m going for a piss,’ Roberts replied, stalking off in a flurry of coat-tails.

‘Let’s dance then, shall we?’ asked Whistler, turning to Sofi.

Sofi shrugged and disappeared into the crowd, hips already snaking, already drawing some looks. Spider and Tec, characteristically enough, went to the bar. Whistler, propelled by the beat, joined the dancers in the water. She worked her way into the rhythm, trying not to show too much of her natural grace and athleticism – trying, in other words, not to move too much like a skilled fighter – but she soon began to get lost in the pounding of the sinistro bass, dark splashes marking every footfall, dry ice pellets shooting like meteorites around her. An incredible human bestiary moved about her. Twining tentacles, symbiotic machinery, metallic body-parts, feathers, scales. Scales.

He had the most breathtaking skin of scales. A buttonhead – tall, good-looking, naked down to the waist, well-muscled, dancing in perfect, hectic time. His skin seemed to be a brilliant orange, but in the coloured lasers the scales winked with green and red and blue such that it was hard to tell their true colour for sure. He was lost in the tune, but not so lost that he wasn’t edging closer to Whistler. Pretending not to notice, she let him.

When he got within arm’s reach, he looked up briefly, appraising her lithe form, her matt grey skin, lined with blue, which flashed through the slits in her jacket and combats, her deceptively delicate face. His eyes were golden slits – snake eyes. He nodded to her and smiled, barely pausing in his work. She danced closer.

‘Hey,’ she shouted over the music. ‘Nice skin.’

‘You too,’ he answered, winding down to a near-standstill. He brushed a hand through his short-shaved hair, misting the air with fresh sweat.

‘What is it? Lizard scales?’

‘Dragon,’ he said seriously. ‘Well, s’meant to be…’

‘I like it,’ she said, and the hunger in her voice was genuine enough, if not of the nature that he thought.

‘You’re a meathead,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re a dying breed.’

‘What?’ Whistler shouted, craning closer, putting a hand on his bare forearm.

‘I said, you’re a meathead – no plugs. You’re a dying breed. My name’s Tallen.’

‘Whistler,’ she said, narrowing her eyes mischievously at him. ‘And my breed is going strong, thanks.’

‘What?’ he shouted.

Whistler shook her head. ‘You wanna come outside?’

‘Okay, yeah. It’s hot in here, right?’

Whistler took him by one hand and led him through the jostling dancers. She noticed Roberts watching them from the balcony above. He nodded to her almost imperceptibly. The dark shape was swooping and diving up there now – something with wings and a tail. Whistler and her prey passed Tec, who was talking to a pretty blue-haired girl at the bar. He caught her eye as she went. They passed through the sound-cancellation chamber again and the noise was swallowed, to be replaced by an ear-ringing sound vacuum. The man with the dragon-skin was staggering slightly now.

As the pair stepped into the cool night air Tallen stumbled, dragging on Whistler’s arm. The bouncers turned to regard them.

‘Whoa,’ Whistler said, supporting the man’s weight easily. Then to the doormen, ‘He’s a bit wasted – he’s okay.’

‘I think I need to sit. Sorry.’

‘Over here – my van’s over here.’

‘Okay, cool, good…’ He was flagging rapidly now, would start to get suspicious soon. Whistler hustled him away from the doormen, who were fortunately distracted at that moment by a group of raucous townies approaching the club’s entrance. They seemingly forgot the woman with the pointed teeth and wasted friend and went back to work. The giant fish swam lazily through the sky, perhaps looking for smaller holo-fish to eat, snapping its jaws dumbly.

Whistler managed to keep Tallen walking. ‘Sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I ain’t felt all that good since I had the skin done. On and off, y’know…I…’ He stumbled again, going to one knee this time and Spider was behind him with a stunner held concealed in the metal palm of one hand. Under the guise of assisting Tallen back to his feet he pressed its snub muzzle to the side of the man’s neck. Tallen struggled briefly – very briefly – and then his body un-tensed and his limbs became pliant. His slit-eyes were roving back and forth frantically from Whistler to the massive Spider as they propelled him towards the van.

‘Easy money,’ said Tec under his breath, appearing at Whistler’s right elbow.

‘Where are the others?’ she asked equally quietly, trying to look nonchalant as the barely-conscious Tallen put more and more weight on her.

‘Coming.’

The four approached the van as Sofi and Tec emerged from the darkness ahead of them, presumably having found a rear exit from the club, restraining themselves from running in their excitement. A gyrocopter passed low overhead, wheeling off towards the Undercity proper, spotlights flowing over the ground before it. Police.

‘Wagon,’ said Whistler. The button-mic on her jacket relayed this to the van, which opened its door and readied its propulsion system. The harvesters bundled Tallen, who was beginning to recover slightly from the stunner, if not the drug, through the door and into the vehicle. He sprawled on the floor, mooing weakly with fear. A tiny light on his head was blinking. No-one noticed. Tec, Sofi and Roberts were in the body of the vehicle, man-handling Tallen’s flopping form onto the stretcher. Whistler took a last look about her. Satisfied that they were unobserved, she ducked inside. Spider followed, glancing at Tallen approvingly.

Whistler took the controls and coasted them subtly out of the car park. She turned gently around pedestrians, being as hard to notice as possible. There weren’t many people still outside by this time – most of them were in the club, splashing along to the sinistro bass pulses, out of their minds.

Looking in the rear-view monitor, which displayed on a small square of the front wall, Whistler noticed the doorman with the metal spikes watching them as the van rode its suspensor cushion to the edge of the road, paused to wait for a bright green gravpod to pass, and then moved out into the light traffic. Then someone in the queue spoke to him and he returned to work, forgetting about the matt black vehicle as it merged with the night.

‘Easy, eh?’ said Whistler over her shoulder, grinning.

‘Nice product, too,’ opined Roberts, glancing back at the body on the stretcher. The others murmured agreement. ‘Never seen skin like that before. Worth a bit, for sure.’ This was as close to enthusiastic praise as Roberts had ever got.

Whistler was now threading the van down back streets as quickly as any meathead could, eyes wide with adrenaline. One bumper knocked a fly-tipped office chair spinning into a doorway.

‘Why the rush?’ demanded Sofi rudely.

‘Yeah, we’re away free,’ added Spider from the back of the van.

‘I dunno – I thought the bouncer might have been scoping us on the way out. I guess I imagined it.’

Spider craned to peer out of the translucent rear wall of the van. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘No company.’

‘Nothing on the net,’ added Tec from where he sat in his floor cradle, trailing DNI cable.

‘Okay,’ said Whistler, relaxing. ‘Put that BSOD album on again.’ She said it
Bee-sod.
Tec obliged and the repetitive thumping filled the van again.

They continued on down the dimly lit road, chatting happily, debating the value of their human cargo, the relative merits of sinistro versus hexno, other clubs they could hit in the future. Spider and Sofi were passing a joint in the back and Sofi was actually smiling.

‘Oh,’ said Tec. ‘Hmm…’

‘Tec? What is it?’ Whistler asked without looking back at him.

‘Not sure. It might be…’

‘What? Company?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, brow furrowed and head sparkling with yellow confusion. All talk in the van ceased suddenly. ‘I think it’s…’

Something scraped the roof – a whining, sharp metallic noise. The vehicle dipped to one side as Whistler jumped, twitching the controls. An indistinct shadow rushed above them and rose into the sky, visible through the ceiling. Whistler began to ask what the hell it was when it suddenly became clear. Tec patched a zoomed camera view onto a panel of the ceiling and the harvesters watched dumbstruck as the dragon turned, rolling back on itself, and swooped towards them again.