alt.human (19 page)

Ashterhay met Hope’s look and smiled. “!¡
superior
¡! The joeys ’re good,” she said. “They’s with us.”

A short time later, Hope stood in a doorway at the foot of what Ash had told her was one of the Cragsiders’ main nests. Jerra stood with her, his blunderbuss cradled in one arm. The street was quiet, and the occasional trogs who did pass hurried on when they saw Jerra and his gun.

Up above, there appeared to be some kind of parapet, and she could see someone sitting there, feet dangling into space.

Frankhay, in the shadows of the crag, gestured with a nod, and Jerra chaperoned Hope across to where he stood by a barred door.

“!¡
urgent
¡! So how’s we get in, then, gel?”

She looked at the door. She shook her head. She didn’t know.

The gang-boss took one step and the blade flashed from his wrist. He held Hope by a fistful of hair, his blade against her throat. “!¡
anger
¡! Just as well I didn’t trust a single thing you said, then, isn’t it, gel?”

He hurled her aside so that she landed on her knees against the cliff. “!¡
command
¡! Watch her, Jerra,” he said. “And anyone comes out of this door, you take their head off with that big fucker of a gun you’re carrying, you hear me?”

While this happened, the aliens called joeys had been opening out the discs wrapped around their bodies. Frankhay and his militia stood on these, and with a sudden fizzing sound were lifted into the air. The joeys went with them, on more discs or scrambling up the vertical crag with long, loping swings of their arms and legs.

From the ground, on her hands and knees, Hope craned her neck to follow their ascent...

...AND SUDDENLY, UP
on the roof terrace, they were all around us, among us, jumping from floating discs like the float-pads I’d seen the aliens using on their previous raid. But these were no aliens. Or rather, they were, or at least some of them were. But most of the attackers were Frankhay’s militia from the Loop.

I stood in a low crouch, my assailant doubled up on the ground, clutching his crushed balls.

I should have finished him off.

If I were a fighting man I would have snatched the knife he had dropped and stabbed him, or slashed at him, or whatever it is that a real fighting man would do with a knife and a compromised opponent. I’d know the correct angle so that I could stab upwards from below the ribs to pierce the heart. I’d know the feel of warm blood gushing down over my hand.

Instead, I looked around, struggling to understand what had happened. This nest should have been impregnable, and yet Frankhay’s mob were all around us.

Divine had already taken out one of the tall alien joeys with a chair leg through its throat. The thing kept fighting, but it was steadily flagging as its wound seeped deep maroon fluids. As I watched, it lashed out one last time, and caught young Justice with a flailing arm. The boy went down, screaming from what had only been a glancing blow, and I realised there must have been some kind of venom in the alien’s touch.

Justice spasmed, went stiff, and died.

Some of the attackers carried guns, but I realised I hadn’t heard a single shot. They weren’t using them, probably fearful that the sound of a gunfight might bring unwelcome attention from an alien grunt squad.

Sol was over by the nest entrance, only a few steps from relative safety in the caves. Nobody would be able to fight their way into the caves. I willed her to move, but she just stood there like a confused old woman.

I ran to my nest-mother just as Frankhay approached, striding through the battle as if that was not a long dagger that had just swept past his face, or that a club swinging down on someone else and nearly taking him with it.

Frankhay’s pistols remained at his side, but the blade from his wrist jutted menacingly.

I stood between them.

“!¡
command | menace
¡! Move your skinny backside, pid-thief,” said Frankhay. “I want Sol. We have business. I’ll deal with you later, you hear?”

Slowly, I shook my head, but then events were taken out of my hands.

One of the joeys leaned down and swept me off my feet and out of the way. The thing was only a head and shoulders taller than me, but it was like being plucked from the ground by a giant.

Sol stepped forward. I didn’t know what she was doing, but then it became clear that she didn’t either.

“¡
confused
¡! Eh?” she said. “You, Franko? What’s it you’re wanting, then?”

Frankhay was poised, ready to lunge forward with his blade, but instead he paused. He had clearly expected some kind of fight, some effort to resist.

Not the bumbling, confused shell of a woman that Sol had become.

Frankhay looked at her, and then around at the fighting.

With a piercing whistle he called it all to a halt.

“!¡
disbelieving
¡! Sol?” he said softly. “What’s happened to you, woman? What’s happened?”

D
OWN ON THE
street, it was as if nothing was happening. Hope did not know what she had expected, but this silence was eerie.

At one point, a squad of four orphid grunts passed and Jerra melted into a side alley; if they’d seen him with his blunderbuss, they would have seized him instantly. Hope found herself alone. She could have left, then. She could have just wandered off, tailing the grunts and knowing that Jerra wouldn’t dare try to stop her.

But she didn’t.

She had brought this all on. She couldn’t just flee.

The door opened and she stepped back. Jerra was instantly at her side, his blunderbuss trained on the opening as a figure emerged.

It was a man in knee-length black boots, a kilt and a lace vest. When he saw Jerra, he gestured.

Hope and Jerra followed the man up through the stairs and tunnels of the nest. The place felt ancient, carved into the crag, the walls a dimpled, polished marble. The steps were bowed in the middle, worn hollow by generations of feet.

In one long hall, a small group of Cragsiders huddled, guarded by a couple of lanky, stooped joeys. Up another flight of stairs, they emerged on an open area, a terrace, surrounded by a low retaining wall.

Small groups stood guarded by members of Frankhay’s militia. The fighting must have been over in an instant, the Cragsiders subdued by numbers and surprise.

Jerra took her to join Frankhay, who stood with the bald woman Hope recognised from Precept Square: one of the four who had helped Marek and Callo get away, the one who had urged Hope to go when she had been cleared by the grunt with the scanner and hadn’t known what to do. Standing to one side, in the casual embrace of one of the tall alien joeys, she saw me, the man she knew had saved her back at the Square.

And the voices in her head... they fell briefly silent. She met my look, and I saw the question in her expression, and then the voices were back and she looked away.

Frankhay turned to her. One of his long-nosed pistols hung loosely from his left hand, and he used the blade emerging from his right wrist to point and gesture.

Now, he stabbed the air towards Hope. “!¡
conversational
¡! Her,” he said. “So tell me, Sol, if you can find a word in that addled head of yours. Tell me what little Hope of the Burren has to do with all this, eh? She wanders into the Loop pretending to be me, with pids given to her by your young thief here. She plays all innocence. She says she knows you all, but does she? She doesn’t have a clue when we get here.

“!¡
threatening | demanding
¡! So tell me, Sol, my old nest-mother compatriot, who is she? What’s she up to?”

He leaned in close to Sol’s face, but the bald woman just stared back blankly.

“!¡
reasoning | patient
¡! And here’s my real dilemma. I came here bent on revenge. Nobody fucks with my pids. Nobody gets me put on a seek list. Nobody messes with the Loop: we stand alone from the rest of you clans. We always have. You don’t fuck with us.”

The voices were getting louder, a roar, merging into a loud drone. Hope squeezed her eyes shut, trying to blank everything out.

“But look at you, Sol. Look at you!” He turned to me, and asked, “!¡
concern
¡! What happened to her, pid-thief?”

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! They took her and our other elders – a watcher and a squad of grunts. Returned them a few days later. Or, at least, those that survived the interrogations. She’s been this way ever since.”

“!¡
calm
¡! I’d heard rumours,” said Frankhay. “So here I am looking for bloodshed and, I’ll admit it, maybe the chance to inflict some serious damage on a rival clan, but... but fuck, I’m getting soft in my old age. Look at her.
Look
at her!”

A brief whistle broke the stalemate. Someone over by the edge of the terrace; one of Frankhay’s mob.

Frankhay turned and went to look, and Hope and I followed.

A squad of about twenty grunts lined the street at the foot of the crag. Hope recognised the four orphids she had seen earlier, distinctive in their green body suits. They had returned with a squad of craniates and their chlick commander.

They all stood with blast rifles aimed upwards to where we were standing.

Had they followed Frankhay and his militia here to Cragside? Had they somehow picked up on the fighting and come to suppress it? Had someone betrayed Frankhay?

Whatever, they had the leaders of two clans trapped here, and they were clearly about to close in.

Chapter Sixteen

T
HE BLACK CLOUD
came down almost immediately.

We were all distracted by the troopship that had come in to hover over the nearby rooftops. It hung heavily in the air, giving almost animal twitches every so often, gun-pods trained on the terrace.

A couple of the joeys stepped onto float-pads and tried to slip away. They skipped over the retaining wall and dropped down to roof level, heading for a side-street where they might lose themselves to view.

As I watched, needle-thin white lines connected the joeys to the troopship, and then they were gone, and the white lines were just a memory burned on the back of my eyes.

It was Hope who saw the cloud first of all, Hope who understood what it was. She had seen it before, back in that room at the Anders Bars Infirmary, the black swarm that ate everything it encountered.

To me it was just a dark smudge on the sky.

It hung a short distance beyond the troopship, a sooty thumbprint on the silvery grey clouds, a charcoal smear.

I saw Hope staring, and looked more closely as the smudge became a stain became a cloud in its own dark, smutty right.

Over us, cutting out the sun, emitting a high-pitched whine that sounded like I had a swarm of mosquitos trapped inside my skull.

A tail of black flicked down from the cloud like a whip. It brushed past nest elder Jersy and he screamed and went down, clutching at his face. His mate Madder dropped to her knees at his side and tugged at his arm, as if trying to get his attention.

One hand on his face was down to white bones, almost instantly, and a seething black bracelet worked steadily up his arm, stripping the flesh.

His face... For an instant, his eyes still stared out of bony sockets, and then they were covered in a black film and then they too were gone, the sockets empty, and I could see the black mass sinking through into his skull.

I felt someone tugging at my arm. Hope. She pulled me away. We were too close. We staggered back as Madder sobbed and then was covered in black and then was a mass of white bones and disintegrating clothing, picked clean, collapsing onto the heap of bones that had been Jersy.

The swarm of bugs rose, re-merging with the black cloud overhead.

Hope was now pulling so hard she threatened to tug me off my feet if I didn’t go with her. I needed no persuading now. We turned and ran towards the doorway.

All around, chaos was rapidly taking hold.

Some of the people just stood around, bemused by the sudden rush to flee. They hadn’t been as close as Hope and me, and clearly hadn’t seen enough to know that panic and mad escape were the only sensible options. Others had seen, and were running for the exit.

Already, I could see people cramming into the narrow doorway, too many to fit, like leaves plugging a storm drain. I grabbed Hope’s arm and managed to stop her in her flight. We would never get through there.

“!¡
urgent
¡! This way,” I hissed, nodding towards the far side of the terrace.

She looked at me, then past me and I followed her gaze. One of Frankhay’s mob stood a short distance away, arms lashing wildly, a muffled, liquid groan emerging from his throat. His body was black, as if someone had dipped him in tar.

As he fell to his knees, I felt a sharp pin prick on my cheek.

I slapped at it and my hand came away with a smear of blood. I smacked again, rubbed, backing away from the mayhem, only stopping clawing at my face when Hope pulled my hand away, shaking her head, saying, “There’s nothing, there’s nothing. You hear? Nothing on your face.”

We gave the dying man a wide berth, and found our way to the retaining wall. I swung my legs over so that I could stand on the small ledge of rocks on the outside.

Hope followed, clambering awkwardly after me. I started to climb down and across to the balcony, only a short distance away.

Feeling safer here, I stopped and turned to help Hope cross the last gap. She stumbled forward into my arms, and for a moment I held her and she clung on and it was the most human, most needed, thing in the world. Something real in the middle of nightmare, a moment of calm in the most violent of storms. And then we turned and Hope followed me into the heart of the nest.

Inside, it was eerily quiet.

The balcony opened onto a passageway that was the main route down from the terrace.

There, ahead, only slightly reassuring, I saw someone hurrying away. One of ours – no black lace or leathers or kilt – but I couldn’t see who it was. If one had got out, then there must be others, surely...