She caught his mouth to hers. He bucked, a match to the rhythm of her hips. The coarse fabric of his loosened pants rubbed his lower spine. His boots were an awkward weight on the mattress.
He gasped and felt the sweet, metallic flow as he came.
The light worked up beneath their sweat and static. Nim began to burn with a saintly purity of light. Hellequin shut his natural eye against it. The HawkEye implant filled with brilliance.
* * *
Tension filtered through the zoo platform. Hidden in their city of pipes, the roo rats whittled at one another in their soft strange mews. The wrinklenecks kept their heads tucked under their wings and stayed still as carved sandstone. Usually impassive and lumbering, the clothhods were restless. They pawed at the sage that carpeted their stall, interwove their long necks and tossed their heads.
The disturbance woke Rust. Her eyes widened, pupils retracting to slits. She raised up onto her fingertips and listened. Just as any other animal in the zoo, she sensed something off kilter in her surroundings. The motion of the circus in flight was more exaggerated than usual; her stomach rose and fell away on waves of movement. But that wasn’t what put the animals on alert. A new scent was detectable – dry and toasted like beet chips – and she had an instinctual impression of danger.
“Lie down, Rust. If I’m to heal, I need to sleep some,” mumbled Pig Heart from his nest.
She hissed to hush him. Her eyes glinted in the half-light.
“Moody dog.” Pig Heart eased back in his sleep. The pig genes from his borrowed heart hadn’t heightened his awareness.
Rust moved to the front bars of her cage. She peered out into the gloom, breath heavy in her lungs. Listening past the distress of the roo rats and the clothhods pacing in their stall, she heard the sound of something being dragged. Also a dry click-clack, and in reply, a rasping. Two voices, thought Rust. Communicating with alien mouthpieces in sucks and whistles of breath.
“There’s blood in the air,” she whispered.
“What’s that?” Pig Heart grumbled, not quite conscious.
“If not now, soon will be.” Rust cocked her head. Who else would see what was afoot? Not the pig with his keelhauled spine. Not the roo rats in their tunnels, not the stone-still wrinklenecks or the dull-brained clothhods. There was only she – a lone wolf sent ahead of the pack.
Picking her way over the sage, she slipped out of the door. She slid the bolt across, less to cage Pig Heart in than to protect him from what lay without.
The sounds were coming from the hoppers’ wagon, parked a few metres to the right of Rust’s. Slowly she approached the cage, which was shuttered up behind its ornate screens. She flinched at a small swish of movement from inside and, again, the long drag of something pulled across the floor. Crouched in front of the screen, Rust listened intently. The click-clack utterances from inside definitely suggesting some level of communication.
Her hands and feet grew cold as the blood channelled to her heart, preparing for fight or flight. A dribble of calcified spit oozed under the screen. It teased down to the ground in a long drip.
Blood is in the air. Rust uncurled to stand on her two feet, her posture stooped and unnatural. She fed a filthy hand around the handle of the screen. Her heartbeat quickened. In one swift motion, she dragged the screen sideways.
The cage inside was in semi-darkness. Rust returned her hands to the floor to assume her preferred position. Her nose twitched. She stuck out a tongue and tasted the air. The scent of the nymphs lingered in their droppings and calcified bedding. Otherwise they might as well have been shipped out and replaced with very different beasts – which, in effect, they had.
A lone gas lamp hung off a nail alongside the clothhod stable. By its dim glow, Rust made out two great hulking shadows that traipsed and swayed about the cage. She brought her face closer.
Down below, the lift rig suddenly ground into motion. The sound tore through the tight atmosphere like a knife. A huge black wing razored out from the semi-dark of the cage, clattering against the bars. Rust leapt back. Crouched on all fours, she retracted her lips and snarled. She knew about self-preservation and all of her senses told her that there were bad things coming out of that cage.
The wing whipped out again, smooth like a beetle’s wing case, but with a jagged outer edge tipped with a long thin barb. Rust glimpsed purple webbing at the underside of the wing. Then came the head of the thing, solidifying out of the dark as it moved closer to the bars. While the hopper nymphs had oval-shaped heads, this new form had protracted skulls and a large neck-frill the texture of calcified bone. A ‘cap’ of iridescent purple exoskeleton fed down between the eyes – which were the same black pustules that belonged to the nymph form, but greatly enlarged. Head feathers spiked out from the neck-frill, exotically pinkish. Mother Nature’s poison signifier. Filamentous antennae fluttered through the bars. The pincers were bowed tusks of shimmering black.
A second head loomed alongside the first. Rust kept her fangs on display. She backed slowly away from the cage. What had happened to the divide bars that separated the cage in two and kept the hoppers apart? Rust’s gaze zigzagged between the ooze at the rim of the cage and the stumps of the dividing bars, wilted like wax. Her brow swelled. Were the front bars also thinning at their base, liquidised by the new drip of mucous?
Below, the elevator rig started up again. The huge bugs rounded on their surroundings, kicking out with tremendous long hind legs that thwacked the floor so the whole wagon vibrated.
“Nasty crawlers.” Rust maintained eye contact while making her retreat. Passing out of view, she scampered noiselessly back to her cage.
Hauling back the bolt, she bounded inside.
“Pig!” She pawed the robust shape of the sleeping man.
“Let me sleep some, woman!” Pig Heart adjusted his position and fell back asleep, snores breaking out one side of his mouth in spit bubbles.
“The shitter must drag itself out my stink bed now.” She kicked him. “Hoppers have grown big and black. Real ugly.”
Pig Heart’s watery weak eyes shot wide. “Hoppers gone black, you say?” He struggled to sit upright, face twisting against the pain, and rested his elbows on his knees. He stayed still and appeared to listen. The noises came again – the distinctive click-clack accompanied by the heavy drag of razored wings through the sage.
“We gotta warn the others,” he said in a sharp whisper.
* * *
“Bring us in real quiet, Das.” D’Angelus shifted his trekker’s hat further back on his head. He squinted up at the huge circus tent billowing in the air overhead. His lips tucked back.
But Jaxx caught the sense of something dangerous. He’d tracked Cyber Circus on instinct, but now he detected a new scent – fustiness which reminded him of animals in close quarters.
“Something’s amiss.” His gaze snatched every which way. The desert was empty except for the dirigible, the strengthening dust cloud and the burrower, which sledged on, spraying dust either side and leaving a deep trench in its wake.
“Time to shoot that bird from the sky!” exclaimed D’Angelus, all smiles.
“Stretch string’s all out, plus we’re better off maintaining speed to keep up with the circus rather than offloading the men to work the cannons,” Das offered. He kept a tight hold on the burrower’s steering rod, the red-lensed goggles he wore giving him an insectile appearance.
“Gotta use the Duster in the nose of this old gal then.” D’Angelus unbuckled his harness and reached up to yank on the roof hatch, drawing it down and sealing them in.
“If we’re gonna stand a chance of aiming the thing right, we’ve gotta dive. But it can’t be deep, else we risk striking down into the Rongun mines.” Das took a hand off the wheel and scrubbed the base of his neck nervously.
D’Angelus shrugged. “We don’t need to dive deep. Just enough to get a steep trajectory on the upturn so we can fire into the sky when we surface.”
“We’re not al
one,” said Jaxx suddenly. He hadn’t known the fact before he said it aloud.
His words went unheeded. D’Angelus clipped back into his harness. He glanced at Jaxx, flashing his customary dead man’s grin.
“May your spirits bring us luck, Siriense!”
Up front, Das stretched a hand to the bank of variegated mechanisms and revolved a large dial by its short brass handle. With a colossal engine roar, Wanda Sue tipped and started to burrow under.
* * *
Descending on the lift rig, Pig Heart hollered down at the lower platforms.
“For the love of the Saints, we need a handler up here! Hoppers have gone locust on us!”
He’d devised a more sophisticated plan originally, one which had involved bargaining the information with Herb in exchange for his reinstatement as chief pitchman. But then Rust had directed his attention to the wilting bars at the front of the hoppers’ cage and that had clinched it for him. The nymphs had shed their passive skin and metamorphosed into a more violent life form – Black Locusts. Which meant one thing to Pig Heart. The two locusts were attempting to break out of their cage in search of a swarm.
His cry filtered through the decks like nerve gas. Panicked voices arose as the lift rig arrived at the canteen level, where the creatures’ handler stood waiting. The man had collected two whips and indicated Pig Heart and the wolf girl aside.
“You may as well stay down here.” He gestured to the crowded canteen. “Once hoppers go locust, we ain’t got much hope except to gas and dump ‘em.” Throwing back his shoulders as if steeling himself to the task, the man pressed the ‘Up’ lever on the rig. “I got a can of gas stored with the roos’ feed,” he shouted down as the lift started its ascent.
“Bare man’s gonna need more than a can of gas to kill those crawlers,” hissed Rust. “There’s blood to be shed. Its stink lies in the air.”
“Shut your yapping, Rust.” Pig Heart glared at her. “Talk like that’ll as good as curse us.” He shivered though, in spite of the swelling heat inside the circus tent.
“Where’s Herb?” he shot across the canteen. His question was met with coughed bursts of ‘traitor’ and mumbled curses. Pig Heart’s old pitch crew hadn’t forgiven him for selling Nim out. “Aw, come on you shitters!” he cried, exasperated. “Ain’t there one of you on board who remembers the way it went ten years ago, huh? What it was like to lose so many good folk to the creatures once they turned?” Pig Heart dragged a hand across his glistening nostrils. His weak eyes turned glassy. “One of you motherfuckers needs to fetch Herb while Rust and me head on up and help the handler to gas ‘em before a swarm gets wind of their scent.”
He froze as a man’s wail sounded from the zoo level. The sound visibly cut through every person below. The canteen darkened a moment as a huge black shape swept down and around the vast expanse of the circus tent. A second beast swooped down, the remains of the handler’s torso suspended from its bloody claws. The hind femora clutched and lengthened. Wings – black, glossy and speckled with calcified spit – beat achingly slowly.
“By the Saints, we need to get those fuckers out of the tent!” Pig Heart glared at Rust. She was trembling – the wolf in her having a better idea of the danger they were in than all the men on the pitch crew.
Cyber Circus understood the violent potential of the two black locusts in its belly. The tent shuddered and tipped sideways on a steep axis as if trying to shake the locusts out the open bottom of the tent.
But now the locusts had shaken off their peaceable nymph sensibilities, they were ravenous. One swept in and around the living quarters and the platforms. The handler’s torso landed alongside Pig Heart, discarded in preference for softer meat. Screams filled the hull as the second locust slipstreamed in behind the first, the rabid pair tearing chunks out of the rails, floor grids, tables and integral structure of Cyber Circus. An eerie whine escaped the calliope as the tent pendulumed. Pitch crew clung to the fixtures, lay flat on the gangways up in the Gods, tucked children into their arms, and held onto the circus for dead life. Some lost their footings, tumbling out into the ether with terrible, pitiful cries. Others were picked off by the voracious locusts.
“Blood in the air,” moaned Rust, cowering at one end of a fixed trestle table.
Clinging to a table leg alongside, Pig Heart told her, “Don’t worry, gal. Cyber Circus’ll shake them out.”
Do it soon, he prayed. Before a swarm comes.
* * *
“Something’s amiss.” Beyond the gauze curtains of the dressing rooms, Hellequin could hear the circus in turmoil.
Nim didn’t stir. Her breathing quietened though, which suggested she was conscious.
“Nim?” he said louder.
“Yes...” She sighed – a bitter sound that suggested peace had been all too fleeting. “I know.”
“I’m heading up to the bridge. You ought to stay put. Avoid whatever mayhem’s occurring out there.”
But Nim was already sitting up. “Last time I stayed here, D’Angelus’s men broke in.” She started to roll up her stockings, wincing against the pain from her arm, which had to be considerable. “Asenath’s right. Its time I had more say over the uses I’m put to.” She stood and tugged on a high-collared field vest with a great many pockets and brass fastenings. Her hair fell about her shoulders, loose, long, the colour of jewel fruit.
“Okay.” Hellequin slid off the bed and fastened his pants.
They slipped out through the gauze curtains. Backstage was littered with broken scenery and a sort of caustic white dung which sizzled as it ate into the floor. Hellequin and Nim stared up in time to see one of the black locusts smash through the rail onto Herb’s private platform then take to the air again.
“Saints almighty, the nymphs have become locusts.” Hellequin got a grip on Nim’s hand. “You remember at the prison when the inmates rocked their wagon? I’d a hunch the beasts had been rubbing up against each other. They can’t do that, you see. After a while, it brings about the metamorphosis. But the handler was sure there’d be no fallout after the prison visit.”
At that instant, a deep drone arose from somewhere far below the tent. It made Nim’s blood run cold.
“Swarm,” she said softly,
Hellequin let go of her hand. He stared at her and asked, “Can you use a firearm?”
* * *
“Locusts are terrible creatures. They’ll strip a farm in a day.” Dressed in her monk robes, the woman stood at the open door and watched the huge bug investigate the platform. The creature froze when it saw her. She stared into the black mirrors of its eyes and saw the ringmaster’s pod reflected there, the narrow stairs, the open door. Her reflection was absent. As if she didn’t exist in that world.
In a great puff of chitinous material, the creature powered off its hind legs and swept back out into the air space.
The woman closed the door. She turned around to find the Scuttlers cowering at the back of the room. Their wrinkled faces peeped out from their toughened shells.
“I’ve shut them out,” she told the children – or so she presumed them to be. They were, after all, what had drawn her to Cyber Circus. ‘A child without bones’ was the way she had put it to the Sirinese, Jaxx, describing the one who would search the nooks and crannies of the mines for the lover she had lost. The Scuttlers were the closest match she had found.
They blinked at her through the steamy air, their soft bodies – the turtle meat of them – cocooned in keratin. In the case of all three, one of the front claws would snap on occasion, a spasmodic action. Their wrinkled old faces retained a sense of youth in the snub noses, blue-blue eyes and plump neck folds.
One of the girls shuffled forward and prodded the Zen monk mask on the floor.
“Nasty ugly,” she said sourly.
The woman tied the belt of dried relics around her waist over the top of the rough cassock. “It’s dress up. Nothing more. A peepo thing to scare off witches and other creepers in the dark.”
/> “I’s try it on,” said the boy. He slunk forward on his belly. His claws were nimble as he worked the cloth mask onto his face. He stared at his sisters then the woman, a grotesque too horrible even for a circus.
“Take it off, Tib,” hissed his other sister, shyer and keeping to the back of the room.
Cyber Circus lurched. The woman laughed as she stumbled. The children rolled with the movement of the ship, limbs tucked up into their nutshells.
The boy, Tib, took off the mask, cheeks puffing as if he was frightened by the fit of it. “Zen monks don’t have titties,” he shot, and all three rolled and snorted at his daredevilry.
“Zen monks don’t talk,” added the shyer, more incisive sister, a squint to one blue eye.
“I’m playing make believe, that’s all.” The woman smiled softly. Wearing the rough dress with its belt of dead things, she looked like a devil from the neck down.
“And your name is?”
“Rind, and ‘tuther one’s Ol.”
“You an angel? One of the Saints’ kin?” asked the bolder sister, Ol.
All three stared at the woman with want in their child eyes.
She sat cross-legged on the floor to match their skilful balance.
“Tell me where you came from?”
The three shortened their necks.
“The father bred us,” said Rind.
“He was a bio-mor-pher.” Ol sounded out the adult word. “Blood worms brought him the bits and pieces he worked with most of the time.”
Tib added, “But we was special. Bred not made.”
“Crossbred. Like the hoppers.” The woman sucked her bottom lip and looked quite the child herself. “Oh, this is some world,” she marvelled.
Her expression grew shrewder. “How did your father come to place you in a circus?”
“Law took him for breeding us. We weren’t the way of what was natural said the government’s man. Herb, he hears and comes and takes us in.” Rind kept a shrewd eye on the woman. “We thought you a Saint come to bless me, he and she.” She used her front pincers like opposable thumbs, indicating herself and her siblings.
Cyber Circus Page 14
