Xenoform (37 page)

Somebody coughed behind him, making him start and drop a bunch of unspooled magnetic tape. He turned around to see Debian watching him sheepishly. ‘Whistler sent me to help you,’ said the young hacker. ‘I’m not sure how much help I can be, but I found this.’ He flicked on an LED torch and threw it to Tec.

‘Thanks.’ Tec gratefully put the tea light aside on a rusty filing cabinet. ‘You can help me find some ducting for the gennie’s exhaust.’

‘Okay, sure. Any specific sort?’

‘Needs to fit on a fifty mil outlet, ideally, but anything at this stage.’

‘Long enough to reach outside, right?’

‘Right. I know it’s a bit fucking hard to see in here, but do your best.’

Debian looked around at the towering shadows of crap alley. ‘Won’t it screw with the back-pressure?’

‘I’m not too worried about that at this stage. We’ll put an impeller in-line if we have to, but let’s just get it connected for now.’

‘Why not just put the gennie on the roof?’

‘We don’t like the place to look too occupied. A ’copter would spot the heat sig.’

‘Judging by what’s going on out there I don’t think they’ll care too much.’

‘You went out there?’

‘Just stuck my head out, really. You should take a look.’
‘I don’t think I want to. I prefer to occupy my mind with matters I can actually deal with.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be any avoiding this one,’ said Debian as he moved off warily into the junk heap.

‘Is the fire still burning?’

‘I think it’s going out. Sofi’s up there with what looks like enough firepower for a small- to medium-sized war. She says it was worse before – she thinks they’re dropping powder bombs on it. There’s a lot of shooting going on, though. Not really my scene. Will this do?’ he asked, holding up one end of a long coil of hose.

Tec craned to see. ‘Plastic?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, it’s quite sturdy-looking, though, and there’s loads of it. About fifty mil diameter, too, I’d say.’

‘As long as it doesn’t melt. One way to find out, I guess.’

‘Depends on what kind of plastic it is, right? We could always use a metal tube for the outlet itself, join this on further up. Based on the assumption that you must have a metal tube somewhere in this lot.’ Debian began to coil the hose around his neck.

‘And you didn’t think you’d be any help.’

‘Well, one can but try. Give me a hand, Tec, there really is miles of this.’

‘You think you can find Spider and Roberts if we can get the link going?’

Although Tec asked the question lightly Debian sensed the great import behind the words. He stopped his work and looked into Tec’s face, seeing the fear beneath the surface. ‘One can but try,’ he repeated softly.

Without another word Tec picked his way over and began to help, holding the LED torch in his mouth. Despite his small stature Debian noticed how strong the man was. He shifted large items aside seemingly without effort, freeing the coils of hose so Debian could collect them. They worked in silence for a time, until they were heavily encumbered by loops and loops of hose. Together they dragged the remainder out onto a clear swathe of floor and inspected it again by torchlight.

‘Yeah, looks about right,’ said Tec. He turned and darted off into the shadows of the junk heap. There was a metallic clanging noise and the sound of muffled cursing. Tec returned sucking on a skinned knuckle, the torch beam slicing across the room. In his other hand he held about half a metre of steel pipe. ‘Ha!’ he said triumphantly.

‘Looks good enough,’ said Debian. ‘How much fuel is there? Diesel, is it?’

‘Yeah, diesel. I’m not sure how much we have. There are a couple of large plastic barrels back there somewhere.’ He waved an arm towards the exterior wall, which was safely barricaded behind mountains of miscellaneous objects. ‘Big blue barrels – maybe you could take this torch and dig them out.’ He passed the torch back to Debian and picked up a tea light.

‘Okay, I’ll have a look.’

Debian waded through the heap as Tec dragged the hose back towards the generator. Debian found the barrels quite quickly even in the gloom. They were almost as tall as he was, though when he tipped them to gauge their fullness the contents sloshed quite a bit. Both about half full, he reckoned. He was no expert on internal combustion engines but he suspected that the barrels still constituted enough fuel to run the generator for quite some time. Maybe eighty litres each. He tipped one and began to roll it on its edge back into the clear alley, moving objects out of his path. A few days ago he could never have imagined being here, doing this. When he reached the gennie with the first barrel Tec was not there but the metal pipe and hose had been clamped onto the gennie’s exhaust outlet. The hose twined across the floor and disappeared up the stairs into darkness.

Debian wiped the sweat from his brow and caught his breath. He bent over the machine and looked at the plug plate on it. There was only a single outlet but luckily it was of a standard design and rated to thirty amps. He had no idea how much current a rooftop-mounted rocket launcher drew, but it would run the computers, and that was what mattered to him.

He began to follow the hose up the stairs. Tec had worked quickly, splicing a break in the hose with a piece of the metal pipe on the upstairs landing. The hose disappeared out of the slightly-ajar door that led to the roof. Debian pushed the door open and stepped out.

At first he couldn’t see Tec, or Sofi, who should also have been up there. He scanned the rooftop for them. The other towers of the complex loomed in the darkness like standing stones. The city crackled with dark and ominous life. There wasn’t a light visible for several blocks in any direction.

And then he spotted them behind a curved ventilation outlet near the edge, crouched in a patch of deep shadow. Tec was looking straight at him, making a repeated chopping gesture with one hand. Debian stared dumbly for a moment before Tec’s meaning became clear:
Kill the light
. He fumbled with the button on the torch and ducked down low like them, stowing it in his pocket. Sofi was beckoning him over. She looked like a pink-crested insect in the dark, all slender limbs and sharp angles. The end of the hose had simply been left lying on the roof off to Debian’s right, its installation unfinished.

A little confused, as well as alarmed, he ran across to them in a crouch, feeling a subdued twinge from the gunshot injury to his leg, a souvenir of his defunct career. He reached the others and dropped to the roof beside them, enveloped by the shadow of the vent. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘Something wrong?’ He was annoyed to hear the fear in his own voice.

‘I think you could say that,’ admitted Sofi. ‘Take a look.’

Debian, puzzled, leaned out around the vent to peep over the edge and down. The lurching shape of a drunk was slowly ricocheting from wall to wall as he weaved his way down the street. Something squarish with a small light on – maybe a malfunctioning domestic robot – was trundling slowly down the centre of the road seemingly ownerless and without purpose.

‘Over there, by the pawn shop,’ hissed Tec. ‘On the wall of that warehouse. About four metres up, maybe. Look!’

Debian scanned the scene below, trying to find the spot Tec spoke of. Catching the vibe of surreptitiousness, he was careful not to be too visible from below. And then he saw it. ‘What is that...?’ he asked, afraid but also fascinated.

‘You fuckin’ tell us,’ suggested Sofi. ‘Cos we have no idea.’

The creature was attached to the wall of the warehouse across the road like a gecko, apparently adhering by its hands and feet. It did look humanoid, but something in its posture was strange and unsettling, as if its joints were not in quite the usual configuration. Its colour was either black or dark green, but it was hard to tell in the low light.

‘There’s something coming out of it,’ said Tec. ‘Look
!’

Debian could see that Tec was right
–
there was some sort of fluid coming from the creature. It poured from some unseen orifice on the thing to run sluggishly down the building, pooling on a low windowsill and then dripping into the street below. It oozed from the kerb and into the gutter where the trickle from the thing on the wall seemed to join a larger stream. Whatever the dark fluid was, the gutter was running with it.

‘Is that a bodymod?’ asked Debian.

‘Dunno,’ said Tec, his face appearing next to Debian’s. ‘Bit extreme if it is, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, I guess...’

‘
And it also wouldn’t explain
that
,’ said Sofi, pointing into the shadows of an old fuel station forecourt.

Debian was stunned. ‘It’s another one,’ he whispered.
He was used to seeing a bizarre selection of bio-mechanical oddities on the streets of City Six, but something about these creatures was unlike anything he had seen before. ‘Are they human?’ he asked in an awed whisper.

Tec shook his head wordlessly – not
no
but
I don’t know
–
and pointed to the second creature. This one was standing in the small yard of a fuel station, seemingly rooted to the spot between the silent hulks of the pumps. Debian couldn’t make out its facial features but its body was weak-looking and gangling, scrawny to the point of emaciation and it swayed very gently back and forth. It seemed to have a second set of arms – shrivelled dangling things that hung from its midsection, but in the low light he couldn’t be certain. They could have been flaps of clothing. Its body below the waist was hidden behind a pump. Another rivulet of slime seeped from the gateway of the forecourt and into the road.

‘
I might know what it is,’ said Sofi, so quietly that Tec asked her to repeat it. She was cradling – almost cuddling – an enormous high-bore conventional rifle with an under-slung grenade launcher. The thing was almost as big as she was and she held onto it like a sailor clutching a handhold on a wildly-pitching ship, as if it were the only solid and dependable object around.

‘What?’ asked Tec.

‘
The greenshit infection. That’s what they look like. I mean, it’s dark, but that’s what they look like from here. Like Vivao. I think he was on his way to becoming one of...
those
.’ She shivered visibly as she nodded towards the street below.

‘Then there’s gonna be more,’ said Tec, swallowing noisily. His face was grim and drawn, his head a guttering play of uncertain colours.

‘
What are they
doing
?’ breathed Debian. ‘They’re just sitting there. And what the hell is that stuff coming out of them?’

‘Dunno,’ said Sofi, her voice unusually small and uncertain. ‘We should get Whistler.’

‘Look!’ hissed Tec. ‘The drunk!’

The staggering man down there was clearly extremely the worse for wear, but he was also clearly a genuine, normal human – a dun-coloured, shuffling Undercity standard of humanity – bedraggled and undistinguished, average height, features hidden by his stoop. He was approaching the creature in the station forecourt, albeit via an indirect route. He hadn’t seen it yet – it was mostly hidden from his point of view – but his path would bring him within feet of it unless he veered off in some unpredictable direction.

‘He’s gonna bump right into that thing,’ said Sofi. Debian could feel her body tense against him as she shifted the rifle fractionally in her grip. ‘Shall I shoot it?’

‘No,’ said Tec. ‘Maybe he’ll just walk past it.’

‘Maybe,’ said Debian without any real optimism.

The man in the street strafed unsteadily to his left, knees shaking, and then straightened up again. He drew abreast with the dark yard where the creature stood, swaying gently with its tangle of stringy hair blowing softly around it. He lurched again as he passed the yard and his head jerked up. The three watchers on the roof knew he had seen it.

‘I’m gonna blast it,’ said Sofi, shouldering the huge rifle.

‘No!’ insisted Tec, and she lowered it again reluctantly, darting him a resentful glare.

The man reeled backwards as he spotted the creature. It was only two or three metres in front of him, almost close enough that he and it could reach out and touch fingertips if so inclined. It didn’t look at him, exactly, but something in its posture suggested acknowledgement of his presence. Debian wished he could see it better. The man down on the street yelled something slurred and indecipherable, pointing unsteadily at the thing in front of him. He looked around for support, found none. Debian glanced again at the other creature – the one on the warehouse wall – but it was still stuck there and showed no signs of responding to the events nearby.

Then the drunk began to behave oddly. He started to stomp his feet up and down. He looked down, his body language panicky, then back to the strange creature. He shouted at it again and this time Debian did hear him: ‘What’cha fuckin’ doin!? The fuck’sis shit!?’ His voice was shrill and panicky. And then he began to scream. He looked as if he was trying to flee but found himself rooted to the spot. He reached down and began to tug frenziedly at his own legs. The creature stared into space, swaying gently, its stick-like arms dangling limply.

‘
No way, no way, no way,’ Sofi began to chant. She had the rifle to her eye now – she must have raised it very quickly – but Tec was quick, too. He pressed the muzzle down, easing her hand away from the trigger.
No
, he mouthed at her. The screams from below were becoming frantic.
No
. She reluctantly gave in.