London Wild (93 page)

In the end February took the left turning, simply so she would be anywhere other than where she was. Kitty followed close behind
, looking at all the shops with interest and pausing occasionally when something caught her eye. On one occasion she even had to run to catch up with February again.

Then
, as they were passing a sandwich bar, February turned to face Kitty. This time it was their turn to disrupt the traffic. ‘Do you think we should stop and have something to eat? We didn’t have any breakfast before leaving this morning.’

‘I am a little hungry,’ Kitty agreed happily.

The sandwich bar was a fairly small place with more tables scattered about than was really comfortable for its size. The customers queued up under a large sign on which were listed a wide selection of various types of sandwiches. Customers gave their orders at one side of the counter and paid at the other. This particular shop was actually being operated by herd rather than the robots, but that was more normally the way of things on Mars.

‘Do you know what you’d like?’ February asked Kitty as she made her own selection.

‘You forget,’ Kitty commented calmly, ‘I can’t read. I have no idea what’s on offer. Choose something for me, would you? Something nice.’

‘Well
, what sort of thing do you fancy? Chicken, beef…’ February started.

‘Chicken sounds good,’ Kitty interrupted.

February gave the order to the woman behind the counter and then took a quick look around the shop as they waited for their order to be processed. There were three couples sitting at various places around the shop, one of whom had brought their children with them. At the back of the shop were a group of six children and two adults celebrating a birthday party.

Before February and Kitty even had their sandwiches, one of the couples had finished theirs and left the shop. They looked unhurried, obviously not savoring rejoining the crowds in the corridors outside. 

This sandwich shop also had several different types of tea on offer, including many herbal ones. February collected the sandwiches, handing one to Kitty, and then paid for them, adding two cups of peppermint tea to the order so they would have something to wash the sandwiches down with.

They then found a table not too close to the herd in the shop and sat so that February could watch the crowds passing through the shop’s glass window. Kitty sat to one side
; it seemed that she also wanted to watch the passing crowds. There was nothing to really look at in the shop except a few rather dull paintings that weren’t even holographic images and that adorned the side walls.

They ate their sandwiches with little more than small talk, carefully avoiding all subjects involving Herbaht or any descriptions of humans as herd. February’s attention was caught for a moment when three men in business suits entered the shop.
There was a moment of concern that she and Kitty had been betrayed—there was always something suspicious about a man in a suit—but she calmed down when they started to examine the overhead sign and choose their sandwiches. 

February made a quick check of the shop’s clock to discover that it was already nearly noon. No wonder she had been feeling so hungry. It hadn’t been breakfast she had wanted
; it had been lunch. Where had all the time gone?

An overheard comment from one of the adults at the birthday party behind
caught her attention: ‘I’m sorry, we couldn’t get you a pet cat for your birthday; the government on Earth has locked them all up for being naughty.’ This was followed by one of the children, likely the birthday boy himself, breaking into tears. The adult, presumably the mother, was able to calm him fairly quickly though by promising him a visit to the swimming baths in the American section of the colony. 

So they did exist,
thought February. Shame she didn’t think she could get away with using them. She was very tempted to go and ask exactly where these baths were and did the woman know anything about a shower shop, but she resisted the urge.

Kitty had finished her sandwich and began to stir a little sugar in
to her tea when February caught a sudden scent on the air. She looked up, startled, and then about as if unsure of herself. ‘Can you smell that?’

‘Peppermint,’ Kitty replied happily
, referring to the tea.

‘No,’ February told her, consider
ing the remains of her sandwich. ‘It’s weird, a living being, a smell similar to our own and yet in many ways totally different.’

‘A hybrid?’ Kitty suggested
, keeping her voice very low so even February had a hard time hearing.

‘Not possible,’ February whispered back,
‘unless you believe those religious stories about how the Patriarchs were created. And that only seems possible if you’re some sort of demigod to start with.’

Kitty shrugged her shoulders and sipped her tea.

February, now more alert than she had been since arriving on Mars, climbed to her feet. ‘Come on, we’d better follow the scent and find out what it means.’

‘Curiosity killed the…’ Kitty started
. It was obvious that she wanted to stay and finish her tea.

‘Don’t finish that comment,’ February warned angrily
. ‘Just follow me, unless you wish to head back to the apartment.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Kitty replied. She sipped from her cup, half standing as she did so. ‘I’d like to know what has gotten you all worked up too.’

The scent was a lot easier to follow than February had expected. It wasn’t herd, and though it was very similar in many ways to Herbaht, it clearly wasn’t. That posed an awkward question that February didn’t want to face. If it wasn’t herd and it wasn’t Herbaht, then what could it be?

The scent led her up one of the ramps to level three
, where the housing was even better than the apartment in which they lived and the air was filled with a gentle perfume that made following the scent a little more awkward, though not impossible.

Level three was a lot less crowded than level two was, or even level one
. The target of this hunt seemed to be moving through the corridors quickly, taking random turnings, and after only a few twists and turns headed up yet another ramp to level four.

February’s mind was set on the search now, but again her paranoia was setting in. W
ere she and Kitty being led this way purposely? What would be waiting for them when they reached the end of this hunt?

They continued up to level four
, following the scent through virtually empty corridors. Whenever it took another turn, February would stop and peer into the next corridor before following. One thing she was sure of was that she didn’t want to find whatever she was following waiting for her and not be ready to defend herself if the situation called for it.

Another up ramp, and they were on level five
. This was the admin level. This was the level on which Stanley worked, and there was a good chance he was here unless he was out on a call somewhere. She and Kitty would have to be careful; if they bumped into him they might have a hard time explaining exactly what they were doing so far from the colony’s thoroughfares.

Fortunately the scent didn’t seem to stay here long, taking the next up ramp to level six. ‘Whoever it is will have to stop climbing soon,’ February commented.

At the top of the ramp the scent she was following mingled with one of a Herbaht. It was very faint and February was so intent on the strange scent that she actually missed it until she had taken seven or eight more steps. Then she backtracked to the top of the ramp in order to make sure they were headed in the right direction.

‘There’s a Herbaht on this level somewhere
,’ February told her friend, and then she started following the scent again. Both of the scents, the strange one and the Herbaht, seemed to be coming from the same direction. The only real difference was that the strange scent had passed through here within the last ten minutes or so, whereas the Herbaht was a lot older and probably only still existed because there seemed to be no other activity in these corridors. As it was, the scent was so old that February was unable to decide whether it belonged to a male or a female.

A lot of these corridors seemed to end in dead ends with a door into whatever business was at the end of the corridor. Usually there was a sign in black paint at the beginning of the corridor naming the business in question. It seemed that the owners of these businesses valued their privacy greatly. If February
hadn’t been following a particular scent via a particular route she could have easily gotten lost in the haphazard mazelike design of the level.

The scent eventually took them down one of those dead ends,
past a black painted sign that read ‘Laboratory 7,’  and towards a door with a hole in it roughly where the handle would have been…a door outside which someone had left a boot upturned on a pile of black dust.

February lifted the boot to examine it, turning it over in her hands. She realized that it was really only half a boot, and it had the remains of a foot still inside. What was more
, it appeared that whatever had caused this had actually cauterized the wound as it had made it, not that it really mattered much to the original owner of the foot.

‘I’m not sure I want to explore any further,’ February told Kitty as she replaced the boot on the back dust. ‘Whatever did this isn’t something I want to come face to face with anytime soon.’

‘Let’s go back then,’ Kitty replied, agreeing emphatically.

February sighed and nodded
. She got up and started to head away from door, moving quietly so as not to attract the attention of whoever might still be inside the room beyond the door with the hole.

As the short dead
-end corridor merged into the main corridor again, February hesitated. Her instincts were nagging at her to leave the area, to find safety on the lower levels again, but the scent of the other Herbaht was too compelling. She could tell it was a male now, and he might need help. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t just turn my back on one of my own race, the same as I couldn’t turn my back on you when I picked you up. I’d really rather not get involved in another’s problem, but I’m also not sure that I could live with myself, knowing that I was here and I was the only one that could help him and I just left.’

‘But,’ Kitty replied worried
ly, ‘what about what happened to…’

‘I know,’ February told her
. ‘I’m not expecting you to come with me. Go back to your master and wait for my return.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ Kitty commented accusingly.

‘Come on, then,’ February whispered almost silently, ‘and keep your head down; don’t let whoever it is get a bead on you with whatever they’re using for a weapon.’

February returned to the laboratory door and pushed it open. What she saw was pretty much what she had expected to see. It was a laboratory, with several desks scattered about the area with computer monitors on them. A number of side tables
lined the walls on which the scientists carried out their various experiments, and shelving covered virtually every other wall, carrying various sorts of equipment.

And then there was the owner of the strange scent. It was a woman dressed in a stylish business suit with a small handbag similar in nature to the one February was carrying
, and though February would never know her name, it was Khosi. She stood by a computer console, not far from a glass door and next to what, from February’s vantage point, appeared to be the only blank wall in the place.

February’s attention was also drawn to the sight of a body lying not too far from the door through which she ha
d just entered, a body which had a large hole cut through his chest, no doubt causing death virtually instantly. As with the foot she had found outside, the wound had apparently been cauterized as it had been made. There were more bodies in here; she could smell them even if she couldn’t currently see them. The woman had to have been responsible. She had come in here and killed every one of the scientists, and what was to stop her adding a couple of Herbaht to her score?

Khosi turned angrily to face the intruders. Her expression was filled with the irritation of having been disturbed. In one of her hands she held what at first glance appeared to be no more than a pen, but it was clear from the way she started to level it towards the two newcomers that it was some type of weapon
, and most likely the weapon that had caused the carnage in the room.

February realized her peril almost immediately
, and she dived for cover behind the nearest of the scattered desks, with Kitty following right behind. The power of the pen was realized a moment later as the beam burrowed its path through the desk, narrowly missing the two interlopers.

Realizing that the desks weren’t much good for hiding behind, except perhaps that the woman couldn’t get a proper aim, February moved as quick as she could across the short gap that separated this desk from the next nearest. This new desk started to topple toward her as one of the legs and half the side of the desk it had supported
were suddenly reduced to ash. The papers that had covered the top of this desk scattered themselves about her, and the computer monitor that had sat atop it crashed to the floor beside her. This was no place to hide. Indeed, she was now the only thing stopping the desk from tipping.