Xenoform (32 page)

Several times Roberts had to stop to allow groups of people to move out of their way. Some of them were led by obvious gang members, who chanted and punched the air, inciting a rising tension that so far seemed undirected. The packs passed by, some of their numbers shooting into the air as flakes of carbon drifted down on the city. Some were moving towards the site of the explosion in the east, some away. There seemed to be no united purpose, not yet.

The harvesters watched them move on from a safe distance, trying not to look threatening. If there was to be trouble on the streets, they wanted no part of it. The only sort of trouble they liked was the kind they made themselves.

‘Where are they going, man?’ asked Spider wonderingly.

Roberts shook his head wordlessly. He waited patiently until he could go. None of the mobs paid them any attention. A huge, rotund man with a massive speaker embedded in his chest trailed after one group, his steady rolling gait like the movement of a sailing ship. His speaker was pumping out a hammering sinistro track. It was the sort of music you could kill to, reflected Roberts.

They turned onto the main road that would take them into the ruined industrial zone where their base was, managing to pick up a little more speed. Several times they passed traffic accidents. Beside one brilliant red gravpod, that had swerved onto the metallised pavement and embedded itself in the wall of a clothing shop, a woman in a cheap suit was on her knees in a glossy pool of blood, her head in her hands. She was crying, her body shuddering with the force of it. Fans of sparks fizzed from the broken shell of her pod, pattering down around her and dying on the pavement. Nobody was stopping to help her. Pedestrians stepped around her and her pool of gore, looking embarrassed, and went on their ways. Their faces were pale and frightened and they glanced often at the sky, looking east to where the fire raged on.

Roberts took one indifferent look at this diorama and went back to watching the road, which was getting busy as they approached Springham Street, which in turn would lead to Stevens Street and Molder Jackson. The traffic first slowed and then stopped just outside the Undercity proper. Roberts sat motionless and expressionless behind the control panel of the van, simply waiting to move again.

‘What’s with all the accidents?’ asked Spider. His heavy brow was deeply creased.

‘Computer problems. Just the beginning, I’m guessing.’ He nodded in the direction of the blazing horizon. A large cat with a suspensor platform instead of legs went pelting past them on the road, yowling in terror. Roberts watched it for a moment. ‘Damn traffic,’ he muttered.

‘Turn off, man,’ suggested Spider, indicating a side road. ‘Go down Sinking Hill.’

Roberts simply said, ‘Nah.’

Soon the traffic shuddered into motion again. Most of the pods were a motley collection – typical Undercity fare. The harvesters’ van, although relatively high-end, had been designed with minimum conspicuousness in mind. Roberts kept calm, breathing deeply and driving sensibly despite the stranded, panicky feeling he was fighting by the minute. He wished he could call base.

Police pods belonging to numerous forces were on the streets. Some sported the white and blue chevrons of the City Police. Several times they were overtaken by these as they came screaming down the hard shoulder, their pulsing lights flushing the day with psychedelic madness. One police pod was parked up at the side of the road and an officer was standing next to it, connected to it by a hi-flo. He was talking heatedly to his companion, gesticulating fiercely. The dashboard inside the pod was dead. Spider guessed they were having some technical problems. Debian’s net-monster loomed darkly at the back of his mind.

As they crawled down Springham Street a gyrocopter weaved into view from their right. It was ducking and lurching randomly, narrowly avoiding a tall dilapidated shopping centre as it crossed the road ahead of them.

‘What’s up with that thing?’ wondered Spider aloud. He craned his neck to follow the ’copter’s course.

‘Dunno, Spidey. Let’s just get us home.’ Voices were rising from the pavement beside the road. People were pointing up at the ’copter, some of them crying out and running for cover.

The gyrocopter rose sharply with a lurch that must have subjected its human crew to several gee. One of its machine guns began to fire into the street several blocks away. Something exploded over there. ‘Shit!’ Spider exclaimed, flinching instinctively. Suddenly the harvesters felt desperately exposed and vulnerable.

People were screaming now, fleeing into buildings, falling over each other. Some drivers were trying to squeeze their pods between the lanes of traffic and affect some sort of escape. Some simply got out and fled on foot. One of these was hit by a ground-cycle and thrown into the air like a rag doll, over the crash barrier and gone, his flailing form briefly silhouetted against the sky. The cycle-rider, joined to his mount only by his hi-flo cable, skidded along the road and hit the back end of an old van. The cycle thudded into him and his body seemed to collapse into an impossibly small space.

Spider looked back at the gyrocopter, which was doubling back on itself, dipping steeply down on one side. Its machine gun was out of ammo but Spider could see the barrel smoking as it continued to spin, madly trying to shoot with bullets that didn’t exist. A police officer fell out of one of the ’copter’s doors and dropped out of sight into the road. A unified cry of horror went up from the bystanders. And then the ’copter darted erratically to its left, sideswiped an office block and exploded in a rose of fire. The huge skeleton of the ’copter’s internal gyroscope, still spinning, bounced playfully off the office building, smashing a gaping hole into its face and landed in the road, crushing several gridlocked gravpods into components.

‘Holy shit!’ bellowed Spider. ‘Get us out of here, man!’

‘I can’t!’ yelled Roberts, thumping the dashboard in frustration.

Several police officers on foot were pelting towards the area where blazing wreckage was raining down into the street. Pods were shuffling to and fro, trapped by each other, their computers trying to affect escape by routes that weren’t there. One driver, fleeing on foot, was bumped by a large silver pod – gently, it seemed, just a nuzzling, really – and began to scream, ‘
I’m stuck! My legs! My legs!’
He was indeed pinned between the silver pod and another in front of it. Far from backing off, the silver pod seemed to press, lovingly, further into the man’s legs. Spider watched in horrified fascination as those legs were pinched off at the thigh and the still screaming torso of the man flopped onto the bonnet of the silver vehicle. Judging by the limp quality of his truncated form the man had mercifully lost consciousness.

A voice from a loudspeaker was shouting instructions at the crowd, mostly ignored: ‘Drivers must remain in their vehicles! Pedestrians are to seek shelter indoors! Please move away from the accident scene! Move back or we will open fire!’ It wasn’t clear which accident scene the voice was referring to – it seemed the whole city had become an accident scene as far as the eye could see, as evidenced by another booming explosion from somewhere off to the north, in the direction of the Lanes.

‘There!’ shouted Spider, pointing to a gap that had opened between an HGV and a small pod on their right. Beyond was the narrow gulley of Duplex Street, which bore west and then turned to cross the old Stevens Canal before bearing south again. ‘Go down Duplex, it looks almost empty!’

‘Right,’ said Roberts quietly.

He inched the nose of the van around as all hell broke loose about them, until it was pointing into the small gap in the traffic, and then opened the throttle all the way. The van took off like a bullet from a gun, clipping the corner of the pod and shunting it round. The driver shouted some sort of abuse (quite justifiably, in Spider’s opinion) through his loudspeaker, but it was lost in the rising whine of the drive system. The van squatted back on its suspensor cushion and burst into the narrow side street.

‘Yeah!’ enthused Spider, clapping Roberts on the shoulder. They tore along beneath the snaggled drapes of cable-car wire and half-rotten effluent pipes that had once dumped illicit industrial waste into the canal, back in the days when there had been industry in these parts. Roberts swerved onto the pavement to avoid an abandoned pod in the road, narrowly missing a dog-faced girl who ducked back into cover just in time, yelping in surprise. The van smashed into a wheelie bin as Roberts struggled to dismount the pavement, obliterating it in an explosion of decayed refuse and rusted metal. Neither of the harvesters flinched – the van was made of sturdy stuff.

‘Looks like we’re away,’ said Roberts with restrained satisfaction.

Just then, the chequered nose of a police pod, in the livery of Resperi Police Corporation, appeared from a side street, inching into the path of the van.

‘Damn!’ declared Roberts through clenched teeth, pulling back sharply on the control to brake. Spider knew they weren’t going to stop in time – they would hit the pod. He barely had chance to brace against the dash.

The van clipped the front quarter-panel of the Resperi pod, spinning it sideways into the far wall of the side street. It gave a brief, protesting howl of siren as it smashed into the brickwork. Spider noticed a rack of missiles on the pod’s roof.

He was jounced hard, cracking his knee painfully on the dash and almost dropping the rifle as the van stopped sharply just beyond the police vehicle. ‘Fucking Resperi!’ he muttered under his breath. Their immunity contract extended to include RPC, but the force had a bad reputation for organisation and professionalism. Rubbing his knee angrily, Spider cracked the skin of the van and shouted out, ‘What the fuck are you playing at? Turn the damn sensors on! You came out of there blind, idiot!’

Roberts put a restraining hand on Spider’s slab-like shoulder. ‘Hang on, Spidey. I think they’re pissed.’

A fight-modded female officer was getting out of the police vehicle. She moved at a trot to block the van’s continuance down the road. Her body was an angular explosion of shiny knife-edges, a complex multi-faceted fractal of blades. She was carrying a machine pistol and deep within the razor-edged surfaces of her head her eyes looked thoroughly furious and also a little frightened. Bad combination. Looking back, Spider could see her companion – a brutish man with some sort of facial piercings – sitting in the passenger seat, presumably with his hands on the controls of that missile rack.

‘Listen, Officer, we’ve got a contract with your force and we just want to get home!’ shouted Spider, a little more reasonably. ‘So if you’d get out of the damn way, we’d appreciate it!’

‘Step out of the van with your hands up!’ called a metallic voice from somewhere within the officer’s strange body. She was almost within spitting distance now.

‘Looks like they don’t mean to honour our contract,’ mused Roberts.

Spider briefly considered shooting her straight through the damaged windscreen of the van with the new mag-rifle, but he knew that those missiles would launch before they could even bring arms to bear on the police pod, what with the van’s automatic systems off-line. And if they started the computerised weapons systems up, then instruments in the police pod would likely register that, also provoking an attack. What to do?

‘Oh dear,’ mumbled Roberts. ‘Look, I’ll get out, Spidey – you stay in the van. When the time is right, shoot that bastard in the pod. You’ll know when the time is right. Right?’

‘Right. What are you going to do?’

But then Roberts was bailing out of the open door, which whooshed shut again behind him, keeping himself between the officer and the van as he went. Spider didn’t think he was armed.

‘Both of you!’ screamed the Resperi woman, her machine pistol levelled at Roberts. Spider knew she couldn’t see him through the van’s one-way skin but she knew he was there. He wished he had kept quiet.

‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ Roberts was asking in his most diplomatic voice, arms spread wide, closing nonchalantly with her. ‘You guys should look where you’re going. Look, we’ll pay for any damage, okay? We just have to get home. Whole city’s going to hell, if you hadn’t noticed.’

The police officer was on him, gun waving him down onto the floor. ‘Get down!’ she shouted in her tinny voice. It must have issued from a speaker somewhere because Spider couldn’t see her lips move. ‘You in the van, come out
now
!’

Far from getting on the floor, Roberts moved quickly, inside the arc of the officer’s weapon. She hadn’t expected him to close with her and she was taken off guard and off balance. Roberts had a stunner in his hand, previously concealed, now revealed like a magic trick. Spider knew the time was right and twisted in his seat, bringing the mag-rifle up in one motion, squaring the male officer in the sights. He fired, once, trusting to instinct, right through the rear wall of the van. He didn’t take the time to carefully draw a bead as he usually would with the dumb-firing weapon. This one shot would have to be right.
Fly
, he thought as the gun hissed softly against his ear.

Maybe the weapon wouldn’t shoot through the side of a tank, even with liquid points, but it certainly killed the officer in the pod spectacularly enough. A small, neat hole appeared in the armoured hide of the van and then the windscreen of the Resperi pod disintegrated in a glittering spray. Spider heard a small, understated
pop
and the interior of the pod filled with a red mist. Through the gory vapour he could see the body of the beheaded officer jerk once and then slump. Blood splattered the bonnet of the vehicle with decorative colour. The dreaded missile rack remained silent.