Xenoform (17 page)

‘Well?’ interrupted Sofi.

Gutsy made a sound which must have been its equivalent of an irritated huff – a sort of toneless buzz – and lowered the U55. Its scan lights blinked out. ‘You will come with me now,’ it said. It occurred to Whistler that the robot had probably just scanned them as well, but that was fine with her. If getting the lead that she needed meant pandering to this idiotic contraption, then so be it.

Gutsy trundled up to the double doors, eagerly sniffed by the sensory apparatus around them. The robot somehow emanated an atmosphere of begrudging servitude with every creak and servomotor groan, and Whistler wondered if it wasn’t actually generating some of the sound effects deliberately. Still grasping the Kalibe smartgun in its claw, Gutsy waved its e-key at the doors and they swung open in perfect synchronicity. A wave of warm, smoke-laden air washed over the party as they followed the robot inside.

They passed between more armoured guards with electric swords at their belts and into a domed, cavernous room whose original purpose could not be guessed at. It was brick-built and immensely tall, its round walls soaring to a conical skylight where the moon peered in blindly. Dark birds, shabby and ruffled – crows or ravens – strutted around up there, their cawing unheard over the pounding of the screw metal emanating from unseen speakers below. Tall embroidered tapestries hung from the high ceiling almost to the floor, their colours rich burgundies and organic khakis, their depictions incredibly detailed.

In the centre of this strange space there was a massive carven chair – a throne, really, as promised, and upon this throne lounged Haspan. His courtiers were a freak-show of diversity and oddness, their gang colours seemingly consisting of a sort of bright and random patchwork. Numbering twenty or thirty, these ranking gang members lay about the place in various states of inebriation, passing reeferettes or juke-pipes or bottles of synthihol drinks. They sported hairstyles of every imaginable garish colour and wild shape. A purple-skinned woman was slumped naked and bored-looking in a massive gilded cage, her eyes vacant and expression utterly defeated. One woman held a child of perhaps ten or eleven on her lap and smoked a juke-pipe over his scruffy head, her feathered body swaying slowly and stare distant. She gripped the glass pipe delicately with an eagle’s claw.

Around the perimeter of the room was a ring-shaped moat filled with an incredible variety of lizards. Some were natural organisms, some robots, some virtual beings, some heavily modded. Their bright hides were like living jewels. They crawled slowly over and around each other, tongues flicking lazily, eyes like coloured glass. Some were as big as crocodiles. Whistler noticed Sofi shudder slightly. She hated all manner of scaly creatures indiscriminately.

Haspan himself was the strangest thing within the inner sanctum. His form was massive and of indeterminate shape. He sported a frightening jumble of bodymods so extreme and varied that it was hard to tell where his real body ended and the numerous additions began. His head was huge and misshapen, horned and ridged and studded with electronic devices like scabs. His mouth was wide and tusked, lips segmented with gold rings. His arms were numerous and varied – some were cybernetic claws and weapons, others were humanoid, others were animal limbs. They sprouted around him like mobile peacock feathers. His legs were as thick as Whistler’s waist and bunched with added muscle tissue. He had four of them, two hanging in front like lower arms and two upon which he sat. Their naked toes were implanted micro-lasers, knife blades and dexterous flesh-digits. It was impossible to guess at the original colour of his skin. To further confuse the eye, his shape was actually subtly shifting under the ministrations of a holo-projector incorporated into his body somewhere, parts of it changing shape or fading into obscurity and then invisibility. He was hideous, magnificent – an apparition in meat and machinery.

Whistler’s team stood stunned and horrified until Gutsy trundled forwards again, prompting them to follow. The machine led them across a narrow bridge that spanned the moat and the lizards scattered away from them, slithering over each other, tails lashing. Gutsy stopped before the huge throne and rotated its upper body to indicate the harvesters with a wave of its flame thrower. ‘These are the visitors who desire your council, Master.’ Abruptly, with what Whistler took to be deliberate theatricality, the music stopped dead and all eyes were on the newcomers.

Haspan’s bulbous head tilted to one side as he studied them and then he spoke in a thick and creamy voice from his monstrous mouth: ‘Welcome to my humble abode. Few enter here unrequested, fewer leave again. Your admittance is a sign of my gratitude for the years of service Roland has offered my organisation. How goes with the gun-man?’

Whistler struggled to speak, so awed was she by this freakish and powerful creature. She gaped, suddenly filled with doubt. Finally her tongue unstuck itself from the roof of her mouth and she said, ‘He seemed well enough to me. We don’t know him, really, to be honest. I don’t know why he helped us.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Haspan, his many and various eyes staring distantly over Whistler’s head, ‘he sought to help us both.’ Someone coughed out juke smoke like a gunshot and Whistler impressed herself by not jumping at the sound.

Roberts said, ‘How so?’ He immediately wished he had remained silent when the bulbous head slowly came to bear on him.

‘What have we here?’ mused Haspan, more to himself than anyone else, it seemed. A camera in his forehead focused its lens intently on Roberts’s face with a quiet buzz.

‘I’m...I’m...er, I’m just...’ Roberts tailed off, looking away with uncharacteristic humility. Even Sofi was silent.

‘I thought so,’ said Haspan, as if this had settled some question in his mind. ‘Don’t fucking speak again,’ he commanded. Then, more gently, he continued to Whistler, ‘You are the body snatchers, yes? You work for HGR.’

This confirmed to Whistler that Haspan really was a man of power, if any uncertainty had remained. Her mind whirled. How the hell did he know that? She was sure that she hadn’t told Roland – she never told anybody as a rule. And if he knew that, maybe he really could help them if he so chose. ‘Yes,’ she breathed, nodding stupidly.

‘Yes,’ Haspan confirmed in his slow and dripping voice. ‘Your line of work is one in which I have a personal interest.’ He flexed his numerous limbs like a spider about to pounce. ‘As you can see. One of my teams even dabbles in the business. From time to time.’

Gutsy beeped quietly and Sofi started. They had all forgotten the robot was still there. Haspan beckoned it closer and held one human hand out for the gun that Gutsy carried. It was the slender hand and arm of a woman, its fingers delicately ringed with platinum bands. ‘What is this?’ His voice had taken on an obvious tone of desire. His hand closed around the smartgun and he held it up, admiring the way the light ran like quicksilver along its smooth barrel. He turned to Whistler. ‘A present?’ His voice was childish with delight.

‘We thought it fitting to bring you a gift,’ answered Whistler, pleased with the gang-boss’s reaction. ‘In gratitude for this meeting.’

‘You know of me?’ Haspan asked, turning the weapon this way and that, scrutinizing the unlit readout.

‘Honestly, no. We try to operate freelance, stay out of gang politics. And we aren’t based around here. We just do our job, go home, keep our noses clean. I would guess that you’re a backing and financing operation – clandestine funding, strategic consultation – that sort of thing. Right?’

Haspan ignored the question. ‘Hmmm...It is a good gift.’ He chuckled deeply and a wireless indicator on his nose started to blink. The weapon came alive in his hand with a whooshing noise like an electric motor winding up. Coloured displays flared along its body. ‘It is loaded?’

‘It is. It can make its own ammo using particles extracted from the air if you give it time. Of course, it also takes a mag.’

‘Yesss...’ he hissed, enraptured, and pointed the gun straight into Whistler’s face. The hole of the muzzle was like an empty eye socket. Whistler, her face inches from the gun barrel, stood her ground. ‘Unused?’

‘Yes,’ she said, a lump in her throat. Slowly, very slowly, Haspan lowered the gun and its lights went out again.

‘Good. I suppose it needs to connect to the net for updates?’

‘Er, yeah, ideally.’

‘You want to know the origin of the greenshit?’

Whistler was momentarily thrown by this abrupt change in subject and she stammered briefly as her brain tried to interpret the words. ‘Y-y-yes,’ she said, inwardly cursing her traitorous voice. ‘The greenshit? You know of it?’

‘It is an infection. It is making people ill. Soon it may start killing people. I care not for people, their lives or deaths. I am an engineer of death myself,’ he said with a touch of pride. ‘But I care for bodymodding. Your belief that the two are connected is correct. I believe.’

‘We thought it must be. The last two people we harvested both had the green things in them. Both had recent bodymods. Our employer asks – insists – that we find the source and stop it. If we can.’

The bizarre courtiers of the underworld boss were silent, listening to every word, perhaps gauging whether the strangers would walk away unscathed from this meeting or not. The lizards shuffled in their pit. Sofi fidgeted nervously. Her hand kept checking for some weapon that was no longer about her person. The woman in the cage lay motionless.

‘You seek the surgeon who made the wings for the city man.’

‘Yes. Do you know who it was?’

‘I do.’

There was a silence, pregnant with tension and expectation, unasked questions in the air like poison vapour. Whistler looked bravely into the face of the man-monster. His expression was unfathomable. The contours of his body were in flux. She could hear Roberts grinding his teeth.

‘Will you tell me?’

Haspan laughed, his shapeless torso quaking with his mirth. The courtiers shuffled worriedly. ‘There will be a price,’ he said at last.

‘What,’ said Whistler, ‘is the price?’

‘Her,’ he answered and a slippery-looking tentacle unravelled to point at Sofi, whose expression was horror-struck. Nobody moved or spoke. ‘I will take her as a lieutenant in my army. She has the look of a killer.’

‘She’s not for barter,’ asserted Whistler. ‘You say you care about the future of bodymodding? Well if this problem goes unsolved there isn’t one. You can’t take her – she’s a lieutenant in
my
army. And she is not for barter.’

‘
Your
army?’ Again the monster laughed and again nobody else joined in. Whistler stood defiant, knowing that she could die at any moment. ‘I WILL TAKE HER IF I WANT!’ Haspan bellowed, his voice like an avalanche of syllables filling the room, rumbling back off the curved walls. ‘I WILL TAKE HER IF I WANT!’ And he was on his feet with a spring faster than his appearance would suggest possible, the U55 coming alive in his hand. He towered several feet above the harvesters like a huge and predatory insect. Gutsy hurriedly backed away across the bridge, body spinning in terror, a veteran of Haspan’s rages.

Whistler was trapped. At any second the gang-members would fall on her team and tear them apart like a wolf pack, or Haspan would just mow them down where they stood. She readied her body for the leap that would take her venomous fangs to Haspan’s flesh. She would die, but he would die with her. She felt her team primed around her, their bodies wired.

She tried one last, desperate time, to reason with him: ‘We can solve this problem if you help us! Or we can both die here, now! All we need is a name! If you won’t help us we’ll just go.
All
of us. You want this matter resolved just like we do!’

Haspan stood quaking with murderous rage. He looked as if he could tear Whistler’s tiny body limb from limb, and perhaps he could. But he did not. The courtiers were transfixed, armed and poised in states of readiness proportional to their inebriation. Whistler’s cool blue eyes were on the boss’s bestial face. His tusks jutted grotesquely from his snarling mouth. His many arms were twitching and switching like cat’s tails. Gradually, seemingly by subtle increments, he sat again upon his absurd chair. The lights on the gun dimmed again. Haspan laid the weapon gently across the vast swathe of his lap and the air of tension seeped away into the shadows of the room like an exhalation.

‘Perhaps I will come for her another time,’ he muttered sullenly.

‘
Then I look forward to our
armies
doing battle,’ said Whistler coolly. Her heart was pounding in her ears louder than her own voice. ‘I don’t doubt that you could kill us here and now, here in your lair. Frankly the notion bores me. I don’t have the time.
Will you help us or not
?’

‘
I apologise for boring you,’ said Haspan in his creamy, sickeningly sweet voice, seemingly a different person again. ‘
You
do not bore
me
. Your rudeness is refreshing, an undervalued trait. His name is Spake. A stupid name, and one that does bore me. But he is a good surgeon. His lab is underneath the BBD car park. Callock Street. Now go before I change my mind.’

Whistler exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realised she was holding and a tremor went down her spine. Death had been narrowly avoided once again. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for your benevolence.’ Not knowing what else to do, she nodded her head in supplication. Haspan waved this nicety away like a bad smell. ‘Enjoy your gun.’ She sought his gaze again but he wouldn’t look at her, like a sulky toddler. Whistler turned, conscious of the staring courtiers, gathering her companions to her like a magnet, and walked back across the bridge. She was unsure whether she had made a friend or an enemy tonight. The robot simply stood there, its weapon-arms twiddling in small circles. ‘Come on, then,’ she said to it. ‘Show us out.’