World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (2 page)

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

He was a young man, skin white as chalk. Shock of frizzy hair. Eager eyes with pupils that flashed with a weird kind of inner light.

“My name is Junius Bilk,” the young man said. “Your ISS liaison.”

“Of course you are,” said Dev. “What else would you be?”

Bilk detached the transcription matrix from the side of Dev’s head. The floatscreens around Dev continued to monitor his heart rate, blood oxygen levels and neural activity. A brain scan revealed the dark bulge of the commplant in the left hemisphere, its dendritic tendrils insinuated into the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

“Is there anything I can get you?” Bilk enquired. “You look a bit peaky. Maybe you need to vomit. I could fetch a bowl.”

“No,” said Dev. He did still feel close to puking, but if there had been anything in his digestive tract, it would have come out. “Why’s it so bright in here?” The ceiling light was as dazzling as the sun. “Hurts.”

“Let me adjust that for you.” Junius Bilk rheostatted the light down to a dull throbbing glare. “Sorry. You’ll be beginning to appreciate that you now have nocturnal vision – a greater than Terratypical concentration of rods in the retina and, behind the retina, a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue that gives the photoreceptor cells an extra chance to absorb light. Like cats have.”

“Meow.”

“Takes a bit of getting used to, I should think. If you weren’t born with it.”

Dev blinked up at the kid. How old was he? Seventeen? Eighteen? Was this the best that ISS could do? Were they recruiting straight out of high school?

“Twenty-six,” Bilk said, as though reading his mind. “I’m older than I look. We maintain our youthful bloom longer here. It’s the absence of UV.”

“‘Here’?” said Dev. His voice was warming up, losing its virgin roughness. “Where’s here?”

“Calder’s Edge.”

“That’s the planet? Never heard of it.”

“No, the city. My mistake. I assumed you knew. Assumed they’d have told you in advance.”

“Don’t assume anything where ISS are concerned, least of all that they’re considerate of my welfare. They tell me zilch, just dump me from place to place and expect me to catch up as I go along.”

“Iota Draconis C. Also known as Alighieri.”

“Alighieri. That’s a clue. The poet Dante’s surname. Someone has a sense of humour... or thinks he does. Thermoplanet?”

“Extreme thermoplanet, actually, orbiting an evolved giant star just outside the Messier 101 nebula. Point-four on the Earth Similarity Index, and one notch above mercurian. It reaches six hundred degrees Celsius up on the crust. Cooler at night, but not by much.”

“Joy.”

“It’s slightly smaller than Earth, but denser in composition, so the gravity is more or less equivalent. You won’t notice any extra buoyancy. Alighieri has a faster rotation, too, so the days are shorter. But again, not so much that you’d notice any difference.”

“Okay. Let me see how this feels.”

Dev was lying supine on a form-fitting, foam-lined mediplinth. He struggled to a sitting position, then swung his legs over the side to stand. Bilk offered to help, but Dev waved him away.

The body he had been downloaded into was short, heavyset, and muscular. Stumpier than he was accustomed to. As best he remembered, he was several centimetres taller than this.

The hands were pale and hairy, with blunt spatulate fingers. Efficient blue-collar hands, not meant for delicate work.

“How do I look?” he said.

Junius Bilk set one of the floatscreens to display a realtime shot of Dev.

Dev warily studied the face. The face he had been given. The face that wasn’t his.

It was coarse and squashed. Rough iron-wool hair peaked from a broad, flat brow. The nose was a squatting frog, the lips chunky. He grinned without humour. Decent teeth, but big.

Not unhandsome, he thought. Puggy, he decided. That was the word for it. Puggy. Like a boxer who’d gone a few too many rounds. The face of a man who liked a scrap, perhaps more than was good for him.

A face he could live with, for however long he had to. Drawn from the colonist DNA bank, so he would be seeing plenty others like it on this world.

He was stark naked, as always on arrival. He glanced down to check how well-endowed, or not, they had made him.

They had been relatively generous this time.

He flexed his arms, articulated his thick, spadelike fingers.

Him, but not him. A new car for the driver that was Dev Harmer. A new extension of himself. A bespoke temporary home.

“Commplant is operational whenever you want it,” said Bilk. “You have clearance for full access to Alighieri’s insite and communications network, plus standard bundled features like memo scribing.”

Dev thought
On
, and felt the buzz of the commplant booting up, an intracerebral tingle. Within a few seconds the unit was synchronised, initialised and awaiting use. A mental cursor winked. He sensed addresses, social media, shared personal data, contact numbers, all lurking behind a partition, accessible as and when necessary.

He set a firewall password:
leatherhill1000
. Then he powered the commplant down. No point wasting energy. Even idle mode burned calories.

“Clothes,” he said, but Bilk had anticipated the request.

The outfit consisted of underwear, an undershirt, and a basic, utilitarian set of dungaree-like overalls, accompanied by thick-soled, sturdy boots. The fabrics were flimsy and breathable. Keeping warm must not be a priority on Alighieri. Likewise fashionability.

“And this.” Bilk held out a reinforced cap, similar to a hardhat, made from keratin derivatives.

“Really?”

“Not obligatory, but folks prefer to wear them outdoors. An umbrella in case of rain.”

Dev took the cap, but didn’t put it on. The impressions he was forming of Alighieri – none of them filled him with delight.

Thermoplanet. Well short of the inner limit of its system’s Goldilocks zone, seared by solar radiation. Human-inhospitable surface. Subterranean habitation only. The principal industry, if he didn’t miss his guess, would be mining.

It certainly wouldn’t be tourism.

Once, just once, couldn’t Interstellar Security Solutions send him somewhere that was a solid “1” on the Earth Similarity Index? A place boasting balmy blue skies and gorgeous sugary beaches. A resort planet, perhaps, with five-star hotels, spas, fine wine, and beautiful bored women looking for some uncomplicated, no-strings fun.

He knew the answer already.

Because bad shit didn’t happen on nice, cosy resort planets. Bad shit happened on the fringes of the Terran Diaspora, out by the Border Wall, on planets that had covetable natural resources or were of strategic importance.

“Other environment-specific physiological attributes you should be aware of,” said Bilk. “Every native-born Alighierian has them, through heritable genes.” He counted off on his fingers. “One, haemoglobin with a high oxygen affinity. Good air is at a premium down here. Two, hyper-efficient thermoregulation, with an increased epidermal vasodilation and eccrine gland response.”

“Translation?”

“The blood vessels in your skin dilate easily in order to shed heat from your bloodstream through convection, and you sweat a lot.”

“Nice.”

“Three, lowered body temperature. You won’t feel cold, though, because the ambient warmth is so high. As for the sweating, try not to overtax yourself aerobically, drink plenty of fluids, and you’ll be fine. Finally, four, your kidneys have been tweaked to produce higher concentrations of the prohormone calcitriol. This counteracts the almost total absence of naturally-synthesised vitamin D due to lack of exposure to sunlight.”

“Right,” Dev said. He was hungry. Famished, in fact. The host form was pristine. It hadn’t been fed yet. Fresh from the growth vat and craving nutrition.

But first things first. Info, then food.

“Briefing,” he said.

Bilk nodded. “I was warned you were the straight-down-to-business type. The profile they sent me –”

“Is just some human resources crap. Piece of fiction. Reduces me to a bunch of bullet points and Myers-Briggs personality metrics. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“The profile said that’s exactly what you would say about it.”

“Do you want to get on my wrong side, Mr Bilk?”

“No sir, Mr Harmer.”

“Then don’t get clever with me. Briefing. Come on. Why have I been inserted here? What’s going on that needs the attention of an ISS troubleshooter?”

“Well, it’s fairly simple,” Bilk began. “Starting just a few weeks back, we’ve been experiencing –”

The room trembled. The floatscreens flickered, readouts scattering into zigzag lines. Cupboard doors rattled in their frames. Shelves and their contents shook. The already dim lighting dimmed further.

Dev felt a deep vibrato hum through the soles of his feet, a sound with a pulse, like a singer reaching some unfathomably low bass note. He gripped the edge of the gurney. It wasn’t that he was going to topple over; more that he found it hard to keep his legs from crumpling.

The noise faded. Stability returned.

“Right on cue,” said Bilk with grim relish. “This is exactly the problem. We’ve been experiencing tremors just like that, and worse, more severe, on a regular basis. No one’s sure what’s causing them or what they signify. They don’t appear to have any natural cause. Calder’s Edge doesn’t lie in a region of seismic activity. It would never have been built here otherwise. There’s been nothing like this in all of Alighieri’s known history.”

“No geological evidence dating back to pre-colonial times?”

“Not as far as we can determine. It just seems that –”

And then it resumed, like thunder. The room heaved and yawed. Some titanic fist was punching, pounding, pummelling from outside. Walls appeared to flex, solid structures turning to liquid.

Dev and Bilk swayed, helpless as a massive force warped the world around them, seeming to bend the very air itself.

The earthquake – this was no mere tremor – rumbled on for a minute and more, merciless, relentless. Dev heard Junius Bilk screaming in panic, and wanted to join in. He kept reminding himself he had known worse – lived through worse. Some of the things he had seen, some of the things he had endured... By rights, life should have no terrors left in store for him.

But he wanted to scream, like Bilk. It was only through sheer willpower that he didn’t.

An ear-splitting
crack
was followed by a tumultuous
crash
.

The ceiling broke and caved in.

An avalanche of rock gushed down from above, right on top of the two of them.

2

D
EV OPENED HIS
eyes and wondered why he wasn’t dead.

The air was filled with dust, dense as fog. He coughed and wiped his eyes.

“Bilk? Bilk?”

No response.

The mediplinth and plain old good luck had saved him. When the ceiling collapsed, Dev had instinctively thrown himself flat on the floor. One end of a support joist had landed on the mediplinth. The rest of the joist had canted at an angle, forming a shelter over him, protecting him from the worst of the falling debris.

He was bruised and battered, but okay.

He hoisted himself up onto all fours, shucking chunks of rubble.

As the dust cleared he saw Bilk, sprawled nearby.

Most of Bilk lay buried under rocks. His head had been crushed. One eyeball was dislodged from its socket. His tongue lolled idiotically. Blood caked his mouth and nostrils.

The transcription matrix had been crushed and ruined, too.

“Ah, damn it,” Dev said. “Well, this is a great start.”

He got shakily to his feet, took one last look at the dead ISS liaison, then began searching for an exit.

The room, his private arrivals lounge, was half-destroyed. Torn electrical cables sparked. A single floatscreen remained on, suspended in midair at shoulder height. It was desperately trying to function, error messages flashing uncertainly.