Xenoform (29 page)

Sofi, bottle in hand, still crackling with illusory electricity, rose from her seat and, far from turning the music off, began to dance. Her hair flicked wildly as she kicked her seat away and started to gyrate to the thumping bass-beat. The bird, noticing, descended lower and began to move around her, spiralling about her body in a blur of feathers. ‘Whooo!’ hooted Sofi, ignoring Whistler completely. She raised her arms and lost herself. Debian watched her, stunned.

‘
Right!’ said Whistler decisively. ‘Right!’ She grabbed the holo-projector from the table and threw it against a wall. It shattered more impressively than she had really expected, raining intricate components onto the counter-top and floor. Tiny, expensive pieces of exquisite machinery glittered and flashed as they showered down. The bird suddenly winked out of existence. The music continued to play, however – Slack Monday’s
Kiss the Bass
was mixing into Fuckerpunch’s underground hit single
Into the Void
and the sub thrummed massively in the metal-walled room, making Whistler want to throw up.

‘What the hell!?’ demanded Sofi, rounding on her. Debian started to make placatory hand gestures.

‘Turn that damn noise off, too!’ shouted Whistler over the racket. She felt the smartgun humming in her pocket. She didn’t even remember having seen it, let alone picking it up. Whistler was not a massive sinistro fan at the best of times, and right now the music was having an adverse effect on her sanity. The gun didn’t really care about her sanity, of course – quite the reverse, it sometimes seemed – it just fed on the tension, the raised voices, the whiffs of adrenaline in the air.

‘Like f–’ started Sofi, before she was cut off by the chime of an incoming communication.

‘It’s HGR,’ said Tec, holding one hand to his ear. This was a common gesture among people communicating by DNI. Apparently it was an instinctive one, even though audio communication channels were relayed directly to the language centres of the brain and not actually heard in the usual sense. He looked relieved by the interruption.

‘Oh!’ said Whistler. ‘I’d forgotten about them.’

‘Should we answer? Is it on net-phone?’ asked Sofi, holo-projector forgotten. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Yeah,’ said Tec. ‘It’s a satellite call, Mother says. Answer it.’ Mother was the building’s central computer, a beast of limited brain but great caution.

‘Okay,’ said Whistler, preening herself, as if by putting her physical appearance in order she could straighten her mind up, too. She moved into the field of one of the camera/microphone communication points. ‘Put it on. Is it Smith?’

Just then, her question was answered for her as the music died and Mrs. Smith’s grim face filled the screen that depended from the ceiling. She looked even less happy than normal.

‘Whistler,’ said the image.

‘Hi,’ answered Whistler, swaying gently. Self-consciously, she put her bottle down.

‘
Who else is there with you?’

Whistler looked around. Tec and Sofi were listening intently, just outside the view of the camera. Debian was looking into the depths of his glass, trying not to overhear or oversee anything that he shouldn’t. He looked up as Whistler’s gaze fell on him. ‘Should I step out?’ he asked.

Whistler shook her head and said to Smith, ‘Nobody you can’t speak in front of. What is it?’

‘
I wanted to talk to you about your latest
assignment
,’ said Smith emphatically.

‘Right...’ said Whistler. ‘About that...’

‘
I know, I know – not good news. As I’m sure you’ve heard, the greenshit is everywhere now – it’s getting out of hand. It appears that some organs we have
passed on
may have caused subsequent infection in patients, even though we scanned them as clean. We are currently fending off investigative demands from the various authorities. City Police actually think we might have something to do with it! We are dissolving all links to sub-mainstream harvesting teams and ceasing trading until this mess is cleared up. And worse still, several people have walked out of here with legitimate parts that we grew on-site and ended up with the infection. This is going to shut us down, Whistler. At least for now.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Whistler, who was having trouble sorting the implications of this out in her mind. ‘So you’re cutting us loose? Is that it?’

‘I regret this, Whistler. We appreciate your services in the past, but we cannot sustain even a core operation at the moment. Of course, keep the money we paid you already for your investigations. I will also personally order the settlement of the remainder of your fee as a token of goodwill.’

‘You don’t even want to hear if we found anything?’

Smith’s eyes narrowed on the screen, making her look even more severe. ‘Did you?’

Whistler felt her mind swimming, wished she had had the foresight to take a hit of Get-Up before answering. She looked around at her companions. Tec looked cool as ever, his lights a mixture of blue and green. He was sipping a beer. Sofi looked ready to punch somebody – she stood tensely, her fists balled at her sides – and possibly because of this, Debian was keeping his head firmly down. ‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘We traced the guy who did the black market work on Leo Travant, but he didn’t seem to know any more than anybody else. We went to visit one of his patients, a man he believed to be infected.’

‘And?’ demanded Mrs. Smith impatiently. She looked as if she wanted to go, as if she had already accepted that the chances of this conversation yielding anything of value to her were virtually zero.

‘
He killed himself when we forced access to his premises.’ Smith snorted derisively, as if she had expected no better. ‘He looked sick, really sick. He was certainly infected, possibly dying. Looked as if he was
changing
.’ She was aware of Tec lighting another smoke behind her.

Smith sighed with such expressive weariness that Whistler almost felt sorry for her. She looked away from the camera for a moment. When she looked back, she seemed ten years older. ‘That’s what they do, Whistler. So it seems.’

‘
What is the end result?’ asked Tec. ‘Into
what
are they changing?’

Smith’s eyes roved across the room, glaring from the monitor like searchlights until the camera homed in on the sound of Tec’s voice. ‘Ah, Mister Simonde,’ she said.

‘Nobody calls me that,’ replied Tec conversationally. ‘But yeah. Hi.’

‘
HGR would like to thank you for your efforts over these last years. I regret that it has not been possible for us to have a closer working relationship.’ Tec nodded minutely in acknowledgement. ‘But business is business. We do not know, Mister Simonde, what they change
into
, if anything at all. Perhaps the mutation is random. Perhaps,’ and here she seemed to take a deep breath, ‘not. We have several subjects under sedation. They are being altered at the genetic level, but we can’t tell exactly
how
. My people are very worried about this, as are the health authorities. The hospitals are bursting, I hear.’ She looked like the grey ghost of happiness lost, her tightly drawn-back hair making the lines of her skull stand out in sharp relief.

‘This other thing – I’m sure you’ve heard of it – could be related, we think,’ said Whistler. She really felt too stoned for this conversation. ‘The er – er – computer thing,’ she finished lamely.

‘Yes?’ asked Smith over arched fingers.

‘We have someone here at the moment who suggests that the current crop of computer problems could be the work of an extremely powerful AI virus. It, or the people who made it, could have hacked the nanovats. We don’t know why this would be, if true. It’s only a hypothesis.’ This last word gave her some trouble but she succeeded in the end.

‘Interesting,’ mused Smith. She stared off into the distance for some time. Whistler could hear only Tec’s slow swigs of beer from behind her. Debian was paying attention now, his polite face turned up to watch the screen where Smith deliberated internally.

‘It’s purely theoretical at the moment,’ he said, speaking to Smith for the first time. ‘I don’t know how we’d verify it.’

The camera turned towards him. ‘Who are you?’ asked Smith abruptly, startled out of her reverie.

‘He’s safe,’ said Whistler, realizing as she said it that she had decided this fact for herself sometime over the last few hours.

Smith sighed deeply. ‘What matter anyway,’ she said rhetorically. ‘Whistler, we have to shut down for a bit. I’m afraid that means the end of your immunity contract, unless you pay for its continuance yourselves, of course. I’m sorry, I don’t know how long this will last. We will look into this computer business, although the problems we are having with our own systems are making our operations difficult. There is something going on in the net, certainly, but due to the degradation in service that it seems to be causing, it’s proving hard to even monitor the situation...’ She trailed off, lost in thought again. Slowly, she seemed to return. ‘Anyway, Whistler, thank you for your service. We will certainly seek to employ your team again in the future.’ Smith shrugged, as if she wanted to say
look after yourselves
or
all the best
but couldn’t make herself do it. ‘Goodbye. And I suggest that you
–’
And then the image on the screen flickered briefly, shredded by a blizzard of interference, and died.

‘What happened, Tec?’ asked Whistler.

Tec held one hand to his head, and she knew he was communicating with Mother. ‘It was cut off from HGR’s end,’ he said.

‘Damn. Computer problems?’

‘We don’t know.’ They sat for a minute in silence and then Tec looked up and asked, ‘Do you feel that?’

‘
What, us being fired?’ asked Whistler, still caught up in her own thoughts. ‘Yeah, I felt it in my bank account. It felt like
–’

‘
No, no!’ Tec was shouting now and rising from his seat. ‘
That
!’ He spread his hands, palms up, and glanced around, his face a caricature of inquiry. And, thought Whistler, fear.

She looked at the faces of the others. ‘What?’

‘
Shit...’ breathed Sofi. ‘What
is
that?’

‘What!?’ demanded Whistler, increasingly irritated. And then she felt it, too. The floor was rumbling, thrumming gently as if she were standing on the hull of some vast machine. ‘Oh...’ she said and then a deep, concussive roar came rolling out of the north-east: The bellow of a monster baying at the gates of hell. Whistler felt a shiver go down her spine.

Sofi was pointing her micro-laser, set to red-dot, her eyes trying to cover every corner of the room at once. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Ssshhh...’ said Debian, head cocked and listening, one finger held up for silence. ‘It’s big, but it’s distant.’

‘
An explosion,’ said Whistler. The roar was still going on, a vast and steady wave of sound washing over them. The bottles on the counter-top jostled each other gently –
ting-a-ling-a-ling
– sounding like a faraway fire-bell. And beneath it all, she heard the hammering of her own heart.

‘Should we take cover?’ asked Debian, his eyes wide, ghostly blanks. The lights in the big room flickered off and then back on. They stuttered again, then steadied. Everybody was looking around themselves, dumbfounded.

‘Downstairs?’ suggested Sofi.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Whistler hurriedly. ‘Come on!’ They scrambled for the stairs. Debian staggered on his injured leg and nearly fell, clutching at the rail to save himself. Whistler noticed that Sofi paused long enough to grab her beer.

They pelted down the steps onto the ground floor of the big room, through the door and down to the living quarters. Whistler’s mind was chanting
What about Spider? What about Roberts?
over and over like a mantra. They were out there somewhere. With the current net problems, would they even be able to get in touch?

The group milled around in the corridor outside Tec’s lab, at least as much as the narrow passage would allow. They could no longer hear the noise, but still a tang of animal fear was in the air.

‘What the fuck was that?’ asked Sofi. Nobody had an answer. ‘Something blew up, right?’ Still no answer. Their breathing was loud in the confined space.

‘Should we go to the hangar?’ Tec asked Whistler. ‘That’s the deepest, safest part of the base. Thick walls.’

Whistler strained to hear. ‘I think it’s stopped,’ she said. ‘And we’re basically in an underground bunker now, anyway.’