Xenoform (21 page)

‘Look,’ said Sofi and her voice was small and childlike. She pointed down to where Vivao’s blood was pooling on the floor. Although the light was low, it was clear to Whistler what was happening. The blood was separating itself into two distinct colours like oil and water demulsifying. One was red and the other was a deep emerald green.

Tomas awoke gradually from a strange and frightening dream in which insects buzzed in clouds about his head, their scatty flight-paths random and confusing. As he incrementally became conscious of reality he was puzzled to discover that the buzzing sound had followed him, somehow, into the waking world. He stretched carefully, trying not to wake his slumbering girlfriend who was sprawled expansively over most of the bed. He sat, gingerly rotating his neck to loosen the knotted muscles. It was still dark beyond the window. The buzzing noise came from outside. His DNI told him it was only three in the morning. Three o’clock?

Tomas swung his legs out of the bed and stood up. The heating was off and the chill air raised his skin in goosebumps. He went to the window and drew the blind to try to see the source of the noise. It was immediately apparent what was making the sound and Tomas’s brow furrowed in consternation. He was transfixed by the scene outside.

Swarms of spyflies were in flight out there. They coiled in vast clouds across the moonlit sky, spiralling in corkscrewed funnels like whirlwinds. There must have been millions of them flying in this hectic, swirling formation. He’d had no idea that there were so many in all the world. He could see the breeze created by their massed rotors stirring odd bits of rubbish in the streets below. He watched them raptly, trying to work out the logic behind their unprecedented behaviour. One hand scratched his stubbled chin.

The moon was high, the streets almost empty, the sky crystal-clear, the usual promise of rain a distant rumour. This was a good neighbourhood and only the local rent-a-cops were on the street. Several of them stood on the pavement below, watching the strange clouds in the sky, excitedly conversing. The twister of spyflies danced up into the sky, elongating, and dropped again low to the ground, compressing, but never touching down. Small trickles of newly arriving spyflies ran into the main body of the corkscrew and joined it. Tomas could not see any of the tiny robots leaving. What were they up to? Had there been some sort of massive system crash?

He watched them for a long time, hypnotised, trying to discern order within the chaos, failing. His reverie was broken only when he sensed movement within the room itself. He turned from the window to see Jalis sitting up in bed, hair attractively tousled, watching him.

‘What are you doing, Tom?’

‘Have you seen this?’ he asked.

‘Seen what?’

‘Out here...’ He turned again to the window. The rent-a-cops had moved on but across the street several other sets of blinds were drawn and pale faces peeped out into the night. ‘It’s weird.’

‘What?’ she asked groggily. ‘Tom, it’s half-three in the morning. Come back to bed.’

And he did. But Tomas found that sleep was a long time coming, and when it came it brought with it puzzling visions of dark and living clouds. Now the insects were machines, and their black wings thrummed the air like electricity. Their tiny maws were fanged and leering. They danced through the air and Tomas ran from them. He knew that the insects themselves would not harm him, but somehow he was certain that their swarming was a precursor to something worse. He didn’t know what it was, but still he ran, his naked feet slapping on the pavement while the sky overhead came to life. When he woke again at seven the swarm outside had gone.

‘
Can’t we just go?’ asked Sofi pleadingly. She sounded close to tears. Nobody had the lightness of spirit to tease her for it. The situation was too bizarre – they all felt the same way. Water from the broken radiator was pooling around their feet, turgidly stirring small bits of detritus. Tiny whirlpools and currents swirled as if the surface of the floor was crawling.

‘We need to speak to Tec,’ insisted Whistler. Roberts was already contacting him, pacing in the furthest corner he could reach, with his shirt bunched over his nose and mouth. ‘He might want us to bring the body back.’ She was aware that her own face was lined with repulsion at this thought.

‘Really?’ asked Sofi. ‘And what do you think we might learn from it? Tec won’t find anything that HGR didn’t, will he. We don’t have the resources, the equipment. Let’s just get out of here.’ She saw that Whistler’s resolve was eroding. She wanted to leave, too, and Sofi pressed on. ‘Our only hope was finding out who was infecting people and stop them, right? Well, the surgeon we found knew no more than we do about it, if you believe him. And what will we find by examining the body that HGR didn’t find themselves?’

‘...I guess,’ mused Whistler. She knew that Sofi was correct, really, that she was only clutching at straws. What could they learn from the diseased and possibly infectious corpse sprawled in the two-tone pool of slime on the floor? Outside, the sun was coming up. Whistler desperately wanted to be out there with it, to feel the gentle warmth on her skin, to smell the relatively clean air of the city, to take it deep into her chest and flush the vileness out of her body. She felt tainted.

Sofi continued: ‘There’s something really wrong here, boss. I vote we give it up, leave it to the big boys and girls, and move into black market or some shit. Anything. Anything but this, really. I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t think I want to. I say we burn that fucking thing and go. Or better yet, just go.’ Her eyes were drawn again to the body on the floor. Its face was locked in an expression of mindless terror and agony.

‘Since when does anybody get a vote, Sofe? This isn’t a democracy, you know.’ But all of them knew that Whistler actually did listen to their concerns, even if she might claim otherwise. ‘Let’s just hear what Tec says. Hang steady a mo, Sofi, okay?’ Sofi’s face trembled, whether in disgust, tiredness or fear Whistler didn’t know.

‘I spoke to Tec,’ said Roberts, interrupting. He didn’t mean ‘spoke to’ in the vocal sense, of course.

‘And?’ asked Whistler.

‘And he says leave the body if we’re concerned about it.’

‘Okay, then,’ said Whistler, openly relieved.

‘Fucking right, I’m concerned!’ stated Sofi. ‘Can we go then – talk on the hoof?’

‘Okay,’ agreed Whistler. ‘That’s all I wanted.’

They left the flat, hands clapped over noses against the stench, all equally relieved to be out of there. There wasn’t much door left now, but they did their best to close what remained. Once on the landing the smell began to diminish and conversation resumed.

‘This guy who appeared at the base,’ said Roberts, ‘Tec says he’s been telling him some crazy stuff, says if it’s true then we may have other trouble, too.’

‘Guy?’ asked Whistler, rubbing her temples, trying to massage her exhausted brain into life. ‘Trouble?’

‘Yeah, the stray from the sewers, remember? Well this guy is saying there’s something wrong in the net, sounds like something big. Why we have to be involved in it, I don’t know. Tec was jabbering on and on, well excited – he says we should leave it, just come back home. He doesn’t want our messed-up corpse in his lab, for some reason. I actually thought he’d want to cut it up or something – you know what he’s like. He suggests that we try another angle. I agree with him, if it matters.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ said Whistler. ‘I guess. I’m fucking vexed, though – I thought maybe we could sort this out easily.’ They headed down the stairs onto the ground floor. The grubby child of earlier was no longer in evidence.

Whistler stopped as they headed out of the main doors and angled across the grass, looking back at the building for a moment, falling behind the others. Roberts noticed and returned. He put a companionable hand on her back and spoke to her softly. She liked it when he took this quietly-understated tone of surety. She imagined it was how a father should speak to you, reassuring without being condescending. ‘I hate to say it, but maybe we should just put this on the back burner for now. I don’t see where else we can go with it. Let’s go home, get some sleep, see what’s up with Tec and this guy, think of our next move. I don’t believe
that
damn thing,’ he pointed back up towards Vivao’s flat, ‘can teach us jack. We have some funds in the company account. Let’s stand back and get perspective.’ Whistler looked into his rocky face, his eyes alert and intelligent behind their film of tiredness. She nodded. ‘Okay?’ he pressed.

‘Okay,’ she said, grateful to him for somehow making her feel all right again. Roberts was a genuine hard-case, but he had heart in there too. ‘Let’s go home.’ She tried to smile but it came out somewhere between wan and grimace.

As they turned to follow Sofi, who hadn’t waited for them, she couldn’t resist one look back at the silent, ominous tower.
What the hell just happened here?
For a moment Whistler could feel the spinning of the world – faster and faster, accelerating out of control. Something was happening and she knew they were missing the big picture. Avenues of investigation led to more questions; uncertainty had leeched into even the most formidable bastions of normality. Who was the stray Tec had taken in? What new problems did he represent? What could be done about this infection? What had happened to Vivao? It seemed he had been changed by the strange parasitic organ in some way. Had he killed himself for fear of what was happening to him or fear of being found? Whistler felt totally lost, totally vulnerable before a storm she could not see coming.

They pretty much let the van drive itself back to base, so tired were they all. Sofi played some psi-trance from a spot on her hand but it only made Whistler feel more sleepy and she demanded silence. Occasionally, she would partially take over control of the van until she came close to hitting another pod or a lamp-post, at which point she would slump back into her seat again. The Undercity passed around them like scrolling film footage – a shimmering collage of mottled shadows. The sun was rising in the sky like a downed fighter dazedly returning to the fray. It looked distant, alien and cold. A suspension of water vapour hung in the air, wanting to become rain. People were starting to crawl out onto the streets and go about their daily business. Once a convoy of police pods screamed past them, heading deeper into the Undercity, sirens howling and roofs ablaze with coloured lights. Dazed and half-asleep, the harvesters barely noted their passing. Sofi was nodding off, her head bouncing against the skin of the van where it rested, her eyes closing sleepily and then flicking open only to gradually close again.

The van did its job admirably, following whatever arcane beacons guided it. It slipped into the underground car park that led to the team’s base like a shadow fleeing the swelling daylight. Whistler had cracked a slit in the van’s shell to allow for fresh air (or the Undercity’s approximation of fresh air, at least) and a cool grey scent of damp concrete filled the vehicle. Sofi shuddered and awoke, presumably subconsciously alerted to either the smell of home or the specific turns and bumps of the van that told her brain exactly where they were. For all Whistler knew, she could have set a satellite positioning marker to sound an alarm into her brain or something. Either way, she sat up and stretched, cat-like, her joints popping audibly. Roberts looked round at her, half-smiling, but didn’t speak. The atmosphere was depressed, subdued. They all knew that things were moving beyond their control. They had few options left and the lack of harvesting work for the foreseeable future spelled uncertainty, perhaps even an end, for their mutual association. Questions about the man Tec and Spider had admitted to the base, and the nature of the problem he had brought with him, swam darkly in the depths of all their minds.

The van picked its way between the pillars with geometric precision, taking its time. It tended to drive itself more carefully than any of its human operators did, possessing as it did a degree of self-preserving instinct. And after all, it had not been expressly commanded to hurry. As usual there was nobody else around in the underground car park that served all the abutting industrial units, although another van – white, older than their own, at least equally nondescript – was parked jaggedly in front of one of the doors opposite. Their van scanned it thoroughly, finding nothing untoward and so not bothering to even alert its human passengers. Little did they know how carefully it micro-managed their interests and safety sometimes.

They paused beneath the sentry guns as the heavy garage door tilted in at the top and slowly raised with a metallic grinding. The van slipped inside and parked itself neatly in its hangar. The room was bright and clinical – a shrine in which the van formed a dark and slab-like altar. Its door irised open and it disgorged its passengers, ragged and dirty onto the highly-polished floor. They looked like bits of litter that had blown in. Whistler led them through the security door into the grim confines of the team’s living quarters. Tec was hunched over a console in his lab, pretty much in the same position they had left him, as if time, passing normally outside, had been frozen in this subterranean den where wires and computer parts crowded every surface, the flotsam and jetsam of a chaotic tide never actually seen in motion. The woolly fluorescent light of the console’s holo illuminated his form like an aura. He did not notice them behind him until Whistler coughed politely.