“There was a war on.”
Kahlo nodded. “People had other things on their minds. He tried to shame TechnoCorp into admitting liability, but nothing he did made a blind bit of difference. That was when the light went out of his eyes. When he stopped being my father and became just this... this robot lookalike. He shaved his head – contrition, self-mortification, whatever. He retired from mining, moved into politics. He stopped caring about anything except what he thought was important, which was Calder’s Edge and being governor. He put all his energies into that, because it was something he could control, and something he could lose himself in.”
“In a way, you can’t blame him.”
“Oh, I can,” said Kahlo with a bitter laugh. “He had a daughter, remember? But he could barely look at me any more. Said I reminded him too much of her – ‘my Soraya.’ I’d lost someone too! But he couldn’t have given a shit. It was all about himself, his status, his career, being Maurice Graydon, the people’s friend and defender. I suppose, as long as he was governor and kept being re-elected, he didn’t have to think about anything else, anyone else. Guess what he said when I told him I was changing my surname to my mother’s maiden name.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘If it makes you happy, Astrid.’ In that smarmy way of his. Same when I told him I was joining the police force. ‘If it makes you happy.’ Like my happiness mattered only to me. He’d cut himself adrift from the rest of the world. People weren’t of interest to him unless he was trying to win their votes, in which case he could pour on the charm.”
“I’ve seen him at it,” Dev said. “He’s good. Super slick.”
“Even his penchant for expensive whisky. That’s not a genuine foible. It’s a schtick. It’s calculated. Makes him look like ‘one of us’ – he enjoys a tipple, spends more money on it than he should, wow, that’s kind of cool, relatable but sophisticated at the same time, what a swell guy.”
“I was thinking just that when I first met him – swell guy, for a politician. The Yamazaki’s a nice touch. Even Thorne, I reckon, who loathes his guts, admires that about him, his fancy booze habit.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Kahlo said. “Graydon does a number on people. He’s been doing it for twenty years. He’s great at being your best friend, and he doesn’t even know what friendship is any more. Emotions are alien to him. He fakes them superbly but he doesn’t have them.”
“A sociopath.”
“But he wasn’t always, that’s the thing. It was my mother’s death that did it to him. It burned him out from the core, left him a hollow shell. I distinctly recall him being fun once, when I was little. Before. He’d play with me. Dance round the kitchen with me. Read me stories. Hug me.”
“I can see why you put distance between you. You had to. It was too painful otherwise.”
Kahlo’s eyes glistened. “It wasn’t petty vengeance. It wasn’t holding a grudge or adolescent acting-out. It was self-protection. I couldn’t be Maurice Graydon’s daughter any longer because I wasn’t Maurice Graydon’s daughter, not in any appreciable way. From my teens onwards, I was more or less an orphan. My father appeared to be still alive, but he wasn’t, not really.”
Dev drew her closer to him, and for a while they lay in silence. He felt the hot trickle of tears on his neck, but said nothing. Kahlo would not want him drawing attention to it. Crying was a weakness, and weakness was anathema to her.
She was more like her father than she realised, or might care to admit.
“So that’s us,” she said finally. “Estranged. Leading very public lives, but nothing much else going on between us. Graydon hasn’t had a girlfriend since he became a widower. Not even a casual fuck now and then. Nothing. And I haven’t exactly been active on that front myself.”
“Just the occasional under-age offworlder.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry.”
“Most of the men I meet, I’m either giving them orders or arresting and interrogating them. Neither of which is really conducive to starting an affair. The crooks, particularly, are none of them what you’d call prime material. Thieves, drunks, troublemakers, wife-beaters, liars...”
“Must give you a pretty jaundiced view of the male of the species.”
“I don’t know. Yes, maybe. What I tell myself is that life’s less complicated when you’ve only yourself to think about. That way – Ah.” She sat up. “Got a call coming in. Konstantinov.”
Dev took the opportunity to slip out of bed while Kahlo conducted the call. He was bursting for a piss – the coffee – and the bathroom beckoned.
As he urinated, he mulled over what Kahlo had told him about her father. A thought struck him.
An unappetising thought.
He tried to dismiss it, but it wouldn’t go. It was stuck in his head like a splinter, and the more he worried at it, the deeper it sank in and the more naggingly unignorable it became.
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.’”<
br />
“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
FROM 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
FOR 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?
Dev was counting on the moleworms’ instincts overcoming whatever sway Jones had over them. He wanted them to listen to their stomachs rather than their puppet master. His plan hi
nged on it.
But the variables were many, and any one of them might mean failure.
“Come on, come on...” he muttered under his breath.
Thorne was getting restless. “My people are asking when something’s going to happen. Any idea?”
“Soon,” Dev said with more confidence than he felt. “Give it time.”
Still the stuttering cacophony of hisses reverberated. It set Dev’s teeth on edge. It was a chillingly inhuman sound, made worse by being amplified to a hundred decibels, rock-concert loud.
Would the moleworms be able to resist its siren call? Perhaps they were all still over at Xanadu, too far away to hear.
“Feel that?”
Kahlo. She was looking down at her feet, a crinkle of apprehension on her brow.
“Feels like another tremor.”
Dev became aware of a tingling in his soles, the ground vibrating.
“The moleworms,” he said. “They’re here.”
The three of them on the esplanade – Dev, Kahlo, Thorne – peered out the more keenly over the city.
The vibration became a distinct thrumming. Moleworms, burrowing their way towards Calder’s Edge. Moleworms in their thousands. A stampede of them.
“Tell your people to power up their rigs,” Dev said to Thorne, “and brace themselves.”As Thorne relayed the instruction, the pit folk platoons hit the ignition button, engaged gear and turned on their tools. Saw blades spun. Drills revved. Jackhammers thumped the air. A new noise arose to add to the deafening scroach chatter and the rumble of the approaching moleworms: the industrial thunder of mining machinery.
“There!”
Kahlo saw it first. Something was breaking through the floor of a plaza not far from East Two station. Claws cracked marble-composite paving stones like eggshell. A hideous head poked up, nasotentacles fibrillating wildly.
The moleworm hauled itself out of the hole it had created. It was medium-sized, orientalis, judging by its dark pink hide. It cast about this way and that, sniffing for the scroaches which it was sure must be nearby. Its vestigial, blister-like eyes seemed to gleam with excitement.
World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Page 28
