World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (22 page)

Alighieri’s shadow was protecting them from the full, searing glare of Iota Draconis.
Milady Frog
was built to withstand excessive temperatures. Her boron carbide hull panels would keep out the worst of the solar thermal radiation. But to fly during the daytime was a risk all the same. Just one chink in the arcjet’s armour, the merest crack, and some vital piece of avionics might be flash-fried to a cinder. What would follow didn’t bear thinking about.

Night flying was by far the wiser option.

Beauregard engaged the autopilot and rested his feet on the control console. For a while, he toyed with an Eye of Horus emblem made of jade, walking it across his knuckles. Then he fell asleep.

Alighieri stretched below, an expanse of darkness.

The arcjet soon gained enough altitude that Dev could make out the planet’s tectonic layout. The plates were demarcated by glowing orange lines, zigzagging cracks where magma blistered up through from beneath. Bursts of brightness were strung along the lines like pearls on a necklace. There, at these hotspots, the volcanic emission activity was intense, huge coronas of lava spurting out one kilometre high.

He had to wonder why anybody would come to this planet voluntarily; indeed, why anybody would have thought it worth colonising. Oh, yes, sure, helium-3, most valuable resource in the galaxy, blah-blah. But the place was as barren and forbidding as you could imagine.

Hell might not exist as an abstract concept any more, but if you were looking for it in reality, you could do a lot worse than start at Iota Draconis C.

Dev snuggled back into the foam-padded contours of his seat and prepared to let the drone of
Milady Frog
’s engines lull him into a doze. Beauregard thought it okay to sleep, so why shouldn’t he too?

He’d had a restless night, after all. The hotel which Kahlo had recommended was none too luxurious. It was little better than a flophouse for migrant miners who were skimping on their living expenses so that they’d have more money to take home at the end of their tours. The walls had been cardboard-thin, so that every snore, burp and fart from the adjacent rooms came through. As for the mattress, it was a slim, tatty slab of contour foam that had lost most of its springiness, made even more uncomfortable by the constant nagging pain in his back and belly, legacy of the Ordeal.

On top of which, he had had to get up horribly early this morning to be at the launch complex to catch the flight.

All in all, he was dog tired.

“Uhm, Harmer?”

Dev half-opened an eye. “Yeah, Trundle?”

Trundell’s face fell. “We’re back to that, are we?”

“What is it? I’m trying for a nap here.”

“Just to say, you remember you asked me if I wanted to follow in Professor Banerjee’s footsteps.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Did you know about Banerjee when you made that comment?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re aware he died in Lidenbrock City, aren’t you?”

Dev fully opened both eyes. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Ah, yes,” said Trundell. “That’ll be why you presented it to me as an incentive and not, in fact, the opposite.”

“How did he die?”

“No one’s sure. It’s not even clear if he did. He just... disappeared one day. He’d finished his paper on moleworms and submitted it for peer review. Everyone assumed he’d be on the next cruiser back to Earth, but he stayed on for a while at Lidenbrock, and then all at once he was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Incommunicado. Off the grid. Never heard from again. His paper was published anyway, and most academics regard it as his final, posthumous work.”

“Oh, well, that’s lovely,” said Dev. “You reckon a moleworm got him?”

“That would be the likeliest explanation. He got too close to one, got unlucky, got eaten. It can happen even to the most experienced zoologist. Occupational hazard when you’re around large dangerous carnivores all the time.”

“Or maybe Lidenbrockers were responsible,” Stegman chipped in. “Those trogs will kill you as soon as look at you. There’ve been rumours that
they’re
dangerous carnivores too – with a taste for human flesh.”

“Cannibals?” said Dev. “Surely not.”

“Never been confirmed,” said Stegman. “But over the years, you hear stuff, you know? Human bones found in kitchen waste disposal units. Butchers’ shops selling mystery meat that isn’t vat-grown. Kids going missing off the street.”

“What is this? Official Creep Dev Out day?”

“Well, they’re just rumours,” said Stegman impassively.

“Plenty of misconceptions about Lidenbrockers,” Beauregard said from the cockpit. He hadn’t been asleep after all, or else only shallowly. “You’ve just got to know how to deal with them, that’s all. They respect toughness. When I’m haggling with them, I stare them in the eye and I don’t back down. Works every time.”

Kahlo had told Dev that Beauregard’s arcjet operation was based around selling the Lidenbrockers luxury goods from Calder’s: quality booze, designer clothing, jewellery, food delicacies. She suspected he also peddled boutique narcotics, the non-TerCon-approved kind that Franz Glazkov traded in, but since the actual transactions took place out of her jurisdiction she was powerless to do anything about it.

Transporting passengers to and from Lidenbrock was very much a sideline for Beauregard. He would make a commodities run once a week, sometimes twice. A passenger run? Once in a blue moon. Lidenbrock wasn’t exactly a favoured destination, and its inhabitants seldom left.

“Anyhow,” said Trundell, “much as I admire Banerjee, I’ve no wish to end up like him – whatever happened to him.”

“But you’ve come all the same,” said Dev. “Braver than you look.”

“I guess I feel I’m doing something useful. Not that xeno-entomology isn’t useful,” he added. “But this seems like the bigger picture. The cosmopolitical picture. If I’m honest, deep down I’m thinking it’s pretty cool. Me, working for ISS in an advisory capacity. The guys back at the faculty would never believe it.”

“Geek,” said Dev, but he said it with warmth.

24

B
ANG ON SCHEDULE,
Milady Frog
began her descent towards Lidenbrock City. A ring of landing lights blazed into life around the ejector tube entrance. The arcjet plunged into the aperture like a falling meteor, Beauregard applying brake thrust only when she was several hundred metres deep into the tube.

He slotted her sideways into a docking bay. Then came a fifteen-minute wait until the hull tiles had cooled to the point where it was okay to exit without risk of getting singed.

Dev used the time to inventory his weapons. Before leaving Calder’s, he had obtained an override code from ISS that allowed him access to the arsenal at the outpost.

Picking his way through the creaking wreckage of the building, ducking under police hazard tape, he had thought about poor young Junius Bilk. The kid’s body had been reclaimed by his family for burial. Dev didn’t like to imagine how his parents must be feeling.

Bilk had served as an ISS liaison for three years, apparently. In that time he would have done nothing but kept the outpost tidy and functioning, studied the training update modules his bosses sent him, and hung on for the moment when he might, just might, be called to active duty.

All that tedium, and no sooner had he some proper work to do, no sooner had his patience been rewarded, than he was killed.

It sucked.

But then what part of life as an ISS employee
didn’t
suck? You had to make the best of it. Otherwise you’d shoot yourself.

The arsenal had yielded an array of location-appropriate hardware – short-range, non-explosive. Dev had selected a hiss gun, a ‘hair-splitter’ knife, and a couple of nano-frag mines. Each was so small and discreet that it could be carried in a pocket. He wanted to be tooled up without looking as though he was tooled up.

Now he checked his pockets one after another, reminding himself where each weapon was secreted.

If Lidenbrockers were as psycho nutzoid as everyone was saying, he might need every edge he could get.

Beauregard stepped out of
Milady Frog
first, leading his four passengers down the rear-loading ramp. The arcjet was still exuding heat, her metal inner structure ticking and groaning as it cooled. There was something of the crouching, high-haunched amphibian about her shape. Her name was a bit literal, but it suited her.

The handful of Lidenbrockers who had assembled to meet Beauregard and his passengers at the docking bay called themselves customs officers, but nothing in their appearance suggested bureaucracy or administration. They wore shabby casual clothing and carried an assortment of guns and other handweapons openly. All of them sported mo-tats – animated loops of writhing snakes, cavorting nudes and bleeding hearts etched on their skin in smart ink.

“My friends!” said Beauregard, arms spread wide. He had warned Dev and the others beforehand that any welcoming committee at Lidenbrock needed to be handled with a degree of finesse.
Keep your mouths shut and leave the talking to me
. “Human cargo only this time, as you see.”

The Lidenbrockers peered past him, every face an imperturbable mask, every gaze steely.

“Those two,” said one of them, singling out Stegman and Zagat. “Don’t like the look of them.”

The Calder’s Edge police officers were in plain clothes, incognito. Uniforms would be considered a provocation at Lidenbrock. In the absence of their regulation utility belts, they had various pacification weapons stashed about their persons, concealed like Dev’s.

Still, with their tight haircuts and stiff bearing, Stegman and Zagat couldn’t help looking like authority. Stegman even had his arms folded and his head tilted in the classic officious cop stance.

“Smell like pig to me,” said another of the Lidenbrockers. The man had a pair of short horns projecting from his forehead. His pupils were vertical slits in scarlet irises. Dev gathered from his preliminary research that plenty of Lidenbrock’s citizens went in for this sort of body modification, voluntarily dehumanising themselves. A statement of rebellion, rejecting standard Diasporan values.

Stegman bridled. “We’re –”

Beauregard spoke over him. “This is purely an informal visit. These gents are here to make a scientific survey.”

“What of?” said Horns.

“Moleworms.”

Someone laughed. “Good luck with that. Haven’t seen any of those fuckers round here in an age.”

“They’re all gone?” said Trundell.

“Yeah, dickface, they’re all gone,” said Horns. “What’s it to you? Don’t tell me, you’re another of those stick-up-the-butt boffin types, come to tag the old moleys and tell us how amazing and fascinating they are.”

“Um, yes.” Trundell gave a nervous blink.

Horns stepped up close to him, leaning in until the bony nodules on his forehead were almost poking the xeno-entomologist’s face.

“Last guy that did that,” said Horns, “it didn’t work out so well for him. Professor Banana Tree or whatever his name was.”

“Banerjee.” Trundell couldn’t help himself. He was a stickler for correctness. Even when intimidated, even when it wasn’t going to do him any favours, things had to be
right
. “Not Banana Tree. Banerjee.”

Horns grinned. His teeth were modified, too, a mouthful of pointed, meshing fangs.

Trundell gulped quiveringly.

“Ooh, pardon me,” Horns said. “My bad. Obviously I haven’t had your education, have I? I’m just a thick dipshit troglodyte.”

“I – I never said that.”

“No, but it’s what you meant.”

“N-no. No.”

“Harvey,” said Beauregard to Horns. “He’s no one. Just a biologist. Leave him alone.”

“Hold on there, wingco.” Horns, a.k.a. Harvey, flapped at hand at Beauregard. “Me and the offworlder are talking. We need to get a couple of things straight. He’s calling me stupid, and I resent that.”

“Look, can we just process our passports and get on?” said Beauregard.

Passports, in this context, meant bribes. Lidenbrock City didn’t demand certified entry permits or work visas or suchlike. A substantial sweetener would get you through the gates, and once you were in the city itself, you were free to do pretty much as you pleased, although you might occasionally be required to pay a ‘tax’ levied by a neighbourhood gang leader or grease the palm of some self-appointed civic dignitary in order to make life easier for yourself and ensure that neither anything you owned, nor you yourself, got broken.