Shadowed shapes slipping around the broken corners of long-dead buildings like oil spreading across the water.
‘There’s a shit load of them,’ I mutter into the radio.
‘Typical fucking understatement,’ Crucify sends back.
‘They appear to be encircling us,’ Szy’m’czyk transmits. ‘They clearly know our approximate area but not our precise location.’
I give that some quick thought. ‘Then we have a little time. Szy’m’czyk, what’s the thinnest concentration of them.’
‘From your location, bearing two five eight.’
I look out in that direction. About a hundred metres beyond where Szy’m’ czyk says they’re circling, I can see a relatively intact building loom out of the fog. ‘How fast can you guys sprint a couple hundred metres?’
‘Faster’n you, shithe – owww!’
‘Be quiet,’ Fred rumbles, the bass levels in his voice making the earpiece vibrate. ‘Just do as you told.’
Crucify mumbles something under his breath which – fortunately for his prospects of continuing with a full complement of arms and legs – Fred either doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore.
‘I can fly it in practically nothing,’ Knight chips in.
‘I know, I’m counting on it.’
‘Hah, of course, death from above delivered wholesale by The Knight!’
Once again, his boundless melodrama gives us pause.
‘Where your kilt?’ Fred asks at last.
‘I told, you, I’m not a Frother!’
Fred pauses to consider that. ‘Wear your kilt,’ he says finally. I choke back laughter.
‘I see your target,’ Szy’m’czyk says. ‘Estimate 12.5 seconds – provided I am not detained by melodrama.’
‘That’s it, everybody laugh at the human,’ Knight grouses.
‘Oh well, if you insist,’ I murmur. ‘All right, here’s the plan. Crucify, drop an ebb bomb on the group directly between us and that tower, break them up. Knight, overfly on vector…’ I gauge the terrain. ‘say one eight zero, give them something to look at. The rest of you, make a break for the gap in the line and don’t stop till you get to the building. If we’re lucky, there’ ll be somewhere in there we can hold them off from.’
‘And if we aren’t?’ Crucify demands morbidly.
‘Then take as many of the fucks with you as you can. Ready… Go!’
And this all sounded so simple when they explained it to us…
Gilbert White is a prime example of SLA middle-management, which is to say he’d sell his kid sister to the Skin Trade if he thought the odds favoured him advancing by it. He’s wearing a two thousand credit Sigerson suit and smoking cigarettes so expensive that there isn’t a name on the packet.
‘Welcome to the Department of Census,’ he says, smile clicking on and off again like a camera shutter. ‘I understand you’ve drawn one of our BPNs?’
Silently I take the BPN slip from my pocket and show it to him.
‘Ah yes, I recall the opportunity.’ Opportunity? What the fuck is he talking about? ‘One of our census takers is somewhat overdue, and we need a team to retrieve his figures.’
The rest of the team stir uneasily, but by common consensus before we came in here I am the only one to speak (ideally it would have been Knight, as the only human in the squad, but nobody fancied drowning in melodrama). ‘Let me be sure I understand you correctly – you’re paying,’ I check the slip, ‘three hundred and fifty creds apiece to locate some census information?’
‘But of course.’ Click-click goes the smile. ‘Knowing the population is the most important part of SLA’s role in the World of Progress.’
Shit on me, he’s serious. ‘Where’d your boy go missing?’
‘Sector 221-G. He has been overdue for almost thirty-six hours.’
221-G… Lower Downtown, there’s a surprise. ‘You got his details?’
White hesitates for a barely perceptible moment, then hands me a dataslug. ‘Of course, some details are SCL-restricted.’
I pass the slug back to Knight – hard as it is to believe, he’s bloody good with computers. Turns out he took the Media package in Meny, but he wanted to get his shots up close and personal. ‘All right, you’ve got yourself a squad. We’ll make contact on a daily basis.’
As we get up to leave, he clears his throat and adds ‘Mr. Gabriel – if a choice has to be made, the information comes first. Do you… understand what I mean?’
Like I said. Little sister. Skin Trade. No remorse. ‘Yeah. I get you.’
Crucify’s ebb bomb lands on the shadows, throwing an actinic flare of light across them as it blasts a hole in their ranks. Sharp, almost canine features unravelling into blood and gore as the ebb energy shatters them, voices raised like baying hounds.
The Carriens hunt tonight.
‘Run!’ I yell into the mike. We take off like a Downtowner with a day pass to the House of Flesh, slipping between the temporarily disjointed ranks of the flesh eaters heartbeats before they close like polluted water behind us. The baying gets louder, more intense, but they waver, confused, as Knight kicks in the Silverback’s flight system and buzzes them overhead, his FEN assault rifle chattering a mocking song at them. I see three go down with wounds that will probably prove fatal, another couple take minor flesh wounds. No feeding on each other now, we couldn’t be that lucky. As the nearest turn to pursue us, I let a part of my mind relax, sorting through the equations my deathsuit feeds me until I find the one I want. Calculations flicker through my mind, I fight the distraction of knowing the carriens are getting closer as I work out the exact variations I need on the basic formula. It hangs in the back of my mind, seeming somehow to pulse with the potential to change the way the universe works even if for just a heartbeat. Flux trickles through me, I only need a taste of it for this and resist the urge to unleash it all in a long flare of energy. Light blazes suddenly, a stroboscope in the murky air; the carriens scream like children, hiding their tortured retinas from the blaze. The release is almost orgasmic, the high that we can never truly satisfy and never surrender to. They say the Necanthropes feel this way all the time, but I – I don’t know how much of that I believe. There is something… alien about the supposed ‘next step’ of Ebon evolution, something I do not entirely trust…
‘Gabriel, move!’ Szy’m’czyk’s voice cuts through my post-Flux reverie, and I unwillingly move my feet back towards the building. Knight whistles overhead, beating me to the door which he slams shut behind me as I stumble through.
‘So far so good – for a fragging change,’ Crucify says. ‘What now?’
‘There should be a bomb shelter…’ I say, shaking my head to clear the lingering after-effects of flux manipulation.
‘I has found it,’ Fred announces. Good lad, Fred – you ain’t as dumb as you sound, are you?
‘Right, everyone down.’ I pause to slap a sticky-backed grenade onto the door and flip the motion detonator. ‘We can hold out for a while there. Daybreak, such as it is, is in about three hours; they should thin out enough for us to make a break for it then.’
We bolt down the stairs; as the heavy steel door slams shut, I hear the boom of the grenade going off.
Back underground. Damn…