Xenoform, page 16
‘What?’ she asked groggily. ‘Tom, it’s half-three in the morning. Come back to bed.’
And he did. But Tomas found that sleep was a long time coming, and when it came it brought with it puzzling visions of dark and living clouds. Now the insects were machines, and their black wings thrummed the air like electricity. Their tiny maws were fanged and leering. They danced through the air and Tomas ran from them. He knew that the insects themselves would not harm him, but somehow he was certain that their swarming was a precursor to something worse. He didn’t know what it was, but still he ran, his naked feet slapping on the pavement while the sky overhead came to life. When he woke again at seven the swarm outside had gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Can’t we just go?’ asked Sofi pleadingly. She sounded close to tears. Nobody had the lightness of spirit to tease her for it. The situation was too bizarre – they all felt the same way. Water from the broken radiator was pooling around their feet, turgidly stirring small bits of detritus. Tiny whirlpools and currents swirled as if the surface of the floor was crawling.
‘We need to speak to Tec,’ insisted Whistler. Roberts was already contacting him, pacing in the furthest corner he could reach, with his shirt bunched over his nose and mouth. ‘He might want us to bring the body back.’ She was aware that her own face was lined with repulsion at this thought.
‘Really?’ asked Sofi. ‘And what do you think we might learn from it? Tec won’t find anything that HGR didn’t, will he. We don’t have the resources, the equipment. Let’s just get out of here.’ She saw that Whistler’s resolve was eroding. She wanted to leave, too, and Sofi pressed on. ‘Our only hope was finding out who was infecting people and stop them, right? Well, the surgeon we found knew no more than we do about it, if you believe him. And what will we find by examining the body that HGR didn’t find themselves?’
‘...I guess,’ mused Whistler. She knew that Sofi was correct, really, that she was only clutching at straws. What could they learn from the diseased and possibly infectious corpse sprawled in the two-tone pool of slime on the floor? Outside, the sun was coming up. Whistler desperately wanted to be out there with it, to feel the gentle warmth on her skin, to smell the relatively clean air of the city, to take it deep into her chest and flush the vileness out of her body. She felt tainted.
Sofi continued: ‘There’s something really wrong here, boss. I vote we give it up, leave it to the big boys and girls, and move into black market or some shit. Anything. Anything but this, really. I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t think I want to. I say we burn that fucking thing and go. Or better yet, just go.’ Her eyes were drawn again to the body on the floor. Its face was locked in an expression of mindless terror and agony.
‘Since when does anybody get a vote, Sofe? This isn’t a democracy, you know.’ But all of them knew that Whistler actually did listen to their concerns, even if she might claim otherwise. ‘Let’s just hear what Tec says. Hang steady a mo, Sofi, okay?’ Sofi’s face trembled, whether in disgust, tiredness or fear Whistler didn’t know.
‘I spoke to Tec,’ said Roberts, interrupting. He didn’t mean ‘spoke to’ in the vocal sense, of course.
‘And?’ asked Whistler.
‘And he says leave the body if we’re concerned about it.’
‘Okay, then,’ said Whistler, openly relieved.
‘Fucking right, I’m concerned!’ stated Sofi. ‘Can we go then – talk on the hoof?’
‘Okay,’ agreed Whistler. ‘That’s all I wanted.’
They left the flat, hands clapped over noses against the stench, all equally relieved to be out of there. There wasn’t much door left now, but they did their best to close what remained. Once on the landing the smell began to diminish and conversation resumed.
‘This guy who appeared at the base,’ said Roberts, ‘Tec says he’s been telling him some crazy stuff, says if it’s true then we may have other trouble, too.’
‘Guy?’ asked Whistler, rubbing her temples, trying to massage her exhausted brain into life. ‘Trouble?’
‘Yeah, the stray from the sewers, remember? Well this guy is saying there’s something wrong in the net, sounds like something big. Why we have to be involved in it, I don’t know. Tec was jabbering on and on, well excited – he says we should leave it, just come back home. He doesn’t want our messed-up corpse in his lab, for some reason. I actually thought he’d want to cut it up or something – you know what he’s like. He suggests that we try another angle. I agree with him, if it matters.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said Whistler. ‘I guess. I’m fucking vexed, though – I thought maybe we could sort this out easily.’ They headed down the stairs onto the ground floor. The grubby child of earlier was no longer in evidence.
Whistler stopped as they headed out of the main doors and angled across the grass, looking back at the building for a moment, falling behind the others. Roberts noticed and returned. He put a companionable hand on her back and spoke to her softly. She liked it when he took this quietly-understated tone of surety. She imagined it was how a father should speak to you, reassuring without being condescending. ‘I hate to say it, but maybe we should just put this on the back burner for now. I don’t see where else we can go with it. Let’s go home, get some sleep, see what’s up with Tec and this guy, think of our next move. I don’t believe that damn thing,’ he pointed back up towards Vivao’s flat, ‘can teach us jack. We have some funds in the company account. Let’s stand back and get perspective.’ Whistler looked into his rocky face, his eyes alert and intelligent behind their film of tiredness. She nodded. ‘Okay?’ he pressed.
‘Okay,’ she said, grateful to him for somehow making her feel all right again. Roberts was a genuine hard-case, but he had heart in there too. ‘Let’s go home.’ She tried to smile but it came out somewhere between wan and grimace.
As they turned to follow Sofi, who hadn’t waited for them, she couldn’t resist one look back at the silent, ominous tower. What the hell just happened here? For a moment Whistler could feel the spinning of the world – faster and faster, accelerating out of control. Something was happening and she knew they were missing the big picture. Avenues of investigation led to more questions; uncertainty had leeched into even the most formidable bastions of normality. Who was the stray Tec had taken in? What new problems did he represent? What could be done about this infection? What had happened to Vivao? It seemed he had been changed by the strange parasitic organ in some way. Had he killed himself for fear of what was happening to him or fear of being found? Whistler felt totally lost, totally vulnerable before a storm she could not see coming.
They pretty much let the van drive itself back to base, so tired were they all. Sofi played some psi-trance from a spot on her hand but it only made Whistler feel more sleepy and she demanded silence. Occasionally, she would partially take over control of the van until she came close to hitting another pod or a lamp-post, at which point she would slump back into her seat again. The Undercity passed around them like scrolling film footage – a shimmering collage of mottled shadows. The sun was rising in the sky like a downed fighter dazedly returning to the fray. It looked distant, alien and cold. A suspension of water vapour hung in the air, wanting to become rain. People were starting to crawl out onto the streets and go about their daily business. Once a convoy of police pods screamed past them, heading deeper into the Undercity, sirens howling and roofs ablaze with coloured lights. Dazed and half-asleep, the harvesters barely noted their passing. Sofi was nodding off, her head bouncing against the skin of the van where it rested, her eyes closing sleepily and then flicking open only to gradually close again.
The van did its job admirably, following whatever arcane beacons guided it. It slipped into the underground car park that led to the team’s base like a shadow fleeing the swelling daylight. Whistler had cracked a slit in the van’s shell to allow for fresh air (or the Undercity’s approximation of fresh air, at least) and a cool grey scent of damp concrete filled the vehicle. Sofi shuddered and awoke, presumably subconsciously alerted to either the smell of home or the specific turns and bumps of the van that told her brain exactly where they were. For all Whistler knew, she could have set a satellite positioning marker to sound an alarm into her brain or something. Either way, she sat up and stretched, cat-like, her joints popping audibly. Roberts looked round at her, half-smiling, but didn’t speak. The atmosphere was depressed, subdued. They all knew that things were moving beyond their control. They had few options left and the lack of harvesting work for the foreseeable future spelled uncertainty, perhaps even an end, for their mutual association. Questions about the man Tec and Spider had admitted to the base, and the nature of the problem he had brought with him, swam darkly in the depths of all their minds.
The van picked its way between the pillars with geometric precision, taking its time. It tended to drive itself more carefully than any of its human operators did, possessing as it did a degree of self-preserving instinct. And after all, it had not been expressly commanded to hurry. As usual there was nobody else around in the underground car park that served all the abutting industrial units, although another van – white, older than their own, at least equally nondescript – was parked jaggedly in front of one of the doors opposite. Their van scanned it thoroughly, finding nothing untoward and so not bothering to even alert its human passengers. Little did they know how carefully it micro-managed their interests and safety sometimes.
They paused beneath the sentry guns as the heavy garage door tilted in at the top and slowly raised with a metallic grinding. The van slipped inside and parked itself neatly in its hangar. The room was bright and clinical – a shrine in which the van formed a dark and slab-like altar. Its door irised open and it disgorged its passengers, ragged and dirty onto the highly-polished floor. They looked like bits of litter that had blown in. Whistler led them through the security door into the grim confines of the team’s living quarters. Tec was hunched over a console in his lab, pretty much in the same position they had left him, as if time, passing normally outside, had been frozen in this subterranean den where wires and computer parts crowded every surface, the flotsam and jetsam of a chaotic tide never actually seen in motion. The woolly fluorescent light of the console’s holo illuminated his form like an aura. He did not notice them behind him until Whistler coughed politely.
Tec jumped as if he had touched a live electrical contact amongst the jumble on his desk and turned round. His stubbled face cracked in a relieved grin. ‘Hey, guys,’ he greeted them and they could see the frenzied intelligence that capered behind his eyes. His head was a shimmering glitter of contradictory colours.
‘Hey, Tec,’ they responded variously.
‘Come in,’ he invited, as if the process of squeezing another three human beings into the tiny room was actually an easy one. They shuffled around each other like the tiles of a sliding puzzle, Whistler ending up next to Tec and the others crammed just inside the doorway. Roberts leant against a shelving unit which shifted. A drift of tiny components and miniature electronics tools slid off the shelf and became one with the mass of similar items on the floor. Roberts looked sheepish and stood up straight. Tec held his tongue although a stripe of irate red blazed down the centre of his head.
‘So what’s up with this guy?’ asked Whistler, aware that she might not really want to hear the answer now, at nine in the morning, which sounded to her pretty undeniably like bed time.
Tec puffed his cheeks out as if to say What isn’t up with the guy? and answered in a rattling blur of something that was certainly English but that Whistler had the most inordinate difficulty in following: ‘Well, he came here via the sewer system, and frankly he was damned lucky to make it with some of the shit that lives down there, and he’s apparently on the run from some sinister agency or other, he’s been working for them, he says, but even he doesn’t know who they really are, he’s some insane computer hacker, I mean some of the stuff he’s shown me is off the scale, the guy is simply a genius, but he says there’s some thing in the net, he believes the people he was working for are behind it, but he also thinks he helped to prime it himself, somehow, and this thing might have put a virus in his head, he reckons, he was scared half to death when we let him in, if Jalan hadn’t sent him, I don’t know that we wouldn’t have let the guns eat him, I’ve been running all sorts of diagnostics on him, he’s got some fucking chip in his head that he made himself, but so far we haven’t–’
Whistler held up her hands to stop him. ‘Wow, Tec, man, I know you’re saying things, but frankly I’ve no fucking idea what they might be, let alone mean. As long as everything’s under control, tell me in the morning.’ She started to rise.
‘It is the morning,’ said Tec, deflated, the lights slowing to a standstill on his skull.
‘Tomorrow morning, then,’ said Whistler, placing a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m done in. Take care with this guy, Tec, he sounds off his rocker.’
‘Sure,’ Tec said, smiling. ‘Junior’s chaperoning him – I’ve got vid-feed from it, but frankly it’s only a gesture. I’m sure he could just take the robot out by wireless in a thousandth of a second, but anyway he’s–’
‘Just don’t get us into anything else that’s out of our league, okay?’
‘As if,’ he answered, already turning back to his console, one hand idly finding a smouldering reeferette roach in an ashtray beside him.
‘Where is the guy now?’
‘He’s sleeping in the big room,’ said Tec’s voice while Tec’s attention was focused upon the console.
‘Where’s Spider?’
‘Playing with his mag-rifle, I think. He’s been up for hours, in his room if you want him.’
‘No, it’s okay. See you later, then.’
‘Bye,’ he said simply.
Whistler, Sofi and Roberts sloped off to their respective beds. As soon as Whistler’s head contacted her pillow her mind simply, mercifully, switched off and she fell instantly, fully clothed, into a state of near-comatose slumber.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Astalle sat on the glasspex chair next to her daughter, Izzy, and let the table surprise her with its breakfast recommendation. She reached across and tousled Izzy’s hair – a gesture of affection that she seemed powerless to stop herself from doing, even though Izzy was six now and openly objected to it. ‘Muuumm!’ she protested and twisted in her chair to avoid the tousling hand.
‘Morning, petal. Been up for long?’
‘Yeah,’ said Izzy, nibbling delicately and somewhat disinterestedly on the corner of a piece of cinnamon toast. Astalle trusted Izzy to rouse herself in the morning and they were used to meeting at the breakfast table in this manner. Izzy was very sensible for her age and could be relied upon to take herself to the toilet and head off to the kitchen to sit at the table, which would fix breakfast for her, and watch the holo until Astalle got up. She knew that Izzy would wake her if she needed to. She had in fact done so the two previous nights, but maybe that was over now.
‘Yeah?’ A bowl of cereal rose from the table just in front of Astalle with the understated subtlety of true high-tech. Astalle considered it the sign of a quality gadget when said gadget tried to do its job as unobtrusively as possible, rather than demanding input and acknowledgement all the time. The breakfast table was one such device, and Astalle was very fond of it – it simply did its job, correctly, and never needed anything. Another by-product of her husband’s lucrative if time-consuming job at the space port. Derech was an ion drive engineer there – actually quite a wide spectrum of specialisation, and one essential to the space industry. On the downside, he practically lived at the place when the launch schedule was heavy, as now. In fact, it had never been as heavy as now. ‘How long? This still your first breakfast?’ Astalle was consistently amazed at her daughter’s ability to eat round after round of breakfast, stopping only when the day’s schedule necessitated it.
‘Few hours. First breakfast, yeah.’
Astalle noticed then how tired Izzy’s small face appeared beneath the thick mass of curls that she had inherited from Astalle herself. She leaned inside the angle of cover provided by that shock of chestnut hair and looked into Izzy’s eyes. ‘Bad dreams again, honey?’ She pulled her bowl of cereal closer and picked up the spoon, but didn’t begin to eat yet.
‘They’re not dreams, Mummy,’ said Izzy, her tone suggesting that she was labouring to be polite to a truly stupid person. She looked away from Astalle, trying to see the holo that danced in the centre of the luxuriant carpet through her mother’s inconvenient physical presence.
‘No?’ Astalle was not sure how to proceed from here. For the last three nights now Izzy had slept poorly. The two previous nights she had woken Astalle from where she slept alone in her double bed, crying and uncharacteristically frightened. Last night she had clearly not bothered, for whatever reason. Perhaps she had given up on receiving help with her monster problem. The thought that her six-year-old daughter might come to a point of such resignation at her tender years saddened her deeply, reminding her that youth – not physical youth, but spiritual youth – was a fragile thing, indeed, and could be broken by the slightest knock. ‘You can come to me if you’re frightened, Izzy, okay?’
‘Okay, Mummy.’ Izzy chewed slowly. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes were beautiful and sad in the morning light that came sheeting in through the crystal glass wall of the second-floor apartment. Cable cars glided silently past outside, their chromed skins flashing greyly in the weak sun. From Astalle’s kitchen she could just make out the forms of suited city execs crammed into the cars like toy soldiers packed into boxes. Another lightpusher was disappearing through the troposphere atop a gently curving contrail, its massive hull now barely visible as a speck of milky light. At least her husband wasn’t actually on one of the damn things.
