World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Read online

  WORLD OF FIRE

  First published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-766-1

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2014

  Cover Art by Jake Murray

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of he copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Also by James Lovegrove

  NOVELS

  The Hope • Days

  The Foreigners • Untied Kingdom

  Worldstorm • Provender Gleed

  Co-writing with Peter Crowther

  Escardy Gap

  THE PANTHEON SERIES

  The Age Of Ra • The Age Of Zeus

  The Age Of Odin • Age Of Aztec

  Age of Voodoo • Age of Godpunk

  Age of Shiva

  THE REDLAW SERIES

  Redlaw • Redlaw: Red Eye

  NOVELLAS

  How The Other Half Lives •Gig

  Age Of Anansi • Age of Satan • Age of Gaia

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  The Stuff of Nightmares

  COLLECTIONS OF SHORT FICTION

  Imagined Slights • Diversifications

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Web: Computopia • Warsuit 1.0

  The Black Phone

  FOR RELUCTANT READERS

  Wings • The House of Lazarus

  Ant God • Cold Keep • Dead Brigade

  Kill Swap • Free Runner

  The 5 Lords Of Pain series

  The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void

  The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon

  The Lord Of Fire

  WRITING AS JAY AMORY

  The Clouded World series

  The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson • Pirates Of The Relentless Desert

  Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos

  In the century after it cast off all religion, humankind flourished and prospered, spreading out beyond Earth, beyond the solar system, to colonise far-flung planets.

  This expansion, the Diaspora, continued until it reached the territory of the race of artificial intelligence zealots known as Polis+.

  There followed a gruelling, decade-long war that ended eventually in an uneasy truce.

  In the years since, along the notional Border Wall between the two empires, a body of men and women – the officers of Interstellar Security Solutions and similar companies – have stood guard against enemy sabotage, sedition and subversion.

  One of these agents is Dev Harmer...

  1

  101010101010111110011011010100111101101010110001101010010100101111010010101010111000010101010101000010100101001011001010010000000010101011101010001010010010100100000111111010101011010100100101001001010001100 Dad? Daddy! Don’t 01011001010010000000010110010100100000000101010111011110101010111010001010

  111010100101001011010101010101111100110110101001111011010101100011010100101001011110100101010101110000101010111101010101000101001010001111001000100101010101011111110010110010100100000000101010111010100010010110010100100000000101010111011100111010110001000111101011010 exclusion from this school 010000

  1111010101010101111100110110101001111011010101100011010100101001011110100101010101110000101010111110100110101011100101011001010010000000010101011101010001001011001010010000000010101011101010101100101001000110101010101010100101001010100101001000101011111101011110101011010101011111111111111111010110101010100110010101 alternatives are a spell of detention at a juvenile correctional facility or 00000100111

  100101100101001000000001010101110101000100011101010101001111011101111101010110101010101010101111100101101010011111001010010111010111101001010101011100001010101 eyes front, Private Harmer 1110101000101

  111001110010000000101000100010101001111100101001011100000101010001101010101010111110011011010100111101101010110001101010010100101111010010101010111000010110101001111100101001010011101101011110010100000111 Frontier War 001001101010101001111100101001011101010010010101010101011111001101101010011110111010101

  111101010101010101010101010111110011011010100111010100111110010100101111101101010110001101010010100101111010010101010111000010 Contact! Contact! Enemy 0100101010101010101010101010010100011101011010101

  110100011010101111111111111110101010110101010101010101010101010101111100110111010100101 scrap metal

  0101010101010101010101011111001101101010110101101101010101010110100001110111101010001110111110101101010100101010101101001000101011111010100011001011001011111001011101010101010101111100110110101001111011010 sustained act of meritorious service and extreme courage under fire 01111001001100001011010000

  010101010101010101010101111100110110101111100110110101001111011010101100011010100101001011110100101010101110000111011100101000101010 Lieutenant, they’re all around us, shit, Lieutenant Harmer 1000111

  1101010111010101010010010101010101010101010101111100110110100010010100000101001010010100001010101010010010001111111010101010 shoot the digimentalist bastards in the 1101010101000111101011110101010100011

  111101010101011110101011011111110110010100101110 Leather Hill 101010101010101010101010001110101010011

  00001010010 aaaaaahhhhhhh!!! 1011001010000001010110101010101010101011111001101011111111101010100111

  0001010110101010100101111111110101100111111111101111101000 terminal physiological damage 101010011

  11010010011 trauma 0100010001010101000010100111010101010111110011011010100111101101010110001101010010

  001011110 regrowth 111001100100 expense 11101000011001011110101110111101101001111110011010111 deal

  01111111111001101101010011110110101011 Solutions 100101110001111111001101 skill set 101000101001011101

  1001010 consultant 1000001010 contract 0001010100 earn 01101001 phased payment 1010101110 valuable 1000010100 Border Wall 11101010 troubleshoot 110 indenture 10 data ’porting

  100101 terms of employment 111010 host forms 00101 Mr Harmer? Mr Harmer?

  “Mr Harmer?”

  A new voice. Loud. Clear. Not a ghost from his past, not part of his life flashing before him. Real.

  “Mr Harmer? You’re fully installed in the host form. Ultraspace download via commplant is one hundred per cent complete. All readings nominal. Feel free to open your eyes.”

  Dev opened his eyes.

  There was the familiar nausea, like a hangover. A tightness in the head, as though he had been squeezed into something he didn’t fit – a foot crammed into a shoe a size too small. He felt a swirling in his belly, travel sickness of the mind.

  “Please speak to me, Mr Harmer, so that I know the insertion was a success.”

  “Shit.”

  “Thank you. How are you feeling?”

  “Shit.”

  “Do you know what your situation is? Are you aware?”

  “Shit.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  He was a young man, skin white as chalk. Shock of frizzy hair. Eager eyes with pupils that flashed with a weird kind of inner light.

  “My name is Junius Bilk,” the young man said. “Your ISS liaison.”

  “Of course you are,” said Dev. “What else would you be?”

  Bilk detached the transcription matrix from the
side of Dev’s head. The floatscreens around Dev continued to monitor his heart rate, blood oxygen levels and neural activity. A brain scan revealed the dark bulge of the commplant in the left hemisphere, its dendritic tendrils insinuated into the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” Bilk enquired. “You look a bit peaky. Maybe you need to vomit. I could fetch a bowl.”

  “No,” said Dev. He did still feel close to puking, but if there had been anything in his digestive tract, it would have come out. “Why’s it so bright in here?” The ceiling light was as dazzling as the sun. “Hurts.”

  “Let me adjust that for you.” Junius Bilk rheostatted the light down to a dull throbbing glare. “Sorry. You’ll be beginning to appreciate that you now have nocturnal vision – a greater than Terratypical concentration of rods in the retina and, behind the retina, a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue that gives the photoreceptor cells an extra chance to absorb light. Like cats have.”

  “Meow.”

  “Takes a bit of getting used to, I should think. If you weren’t born with it.”

  Dev blinked up at the kid. How old was he? Seventeen? Eighteen? Was this the best that ISS could do? Were they recruiting straight out of high school?

  “Twenty-six,” Bilk said, as though reading his mind. “I’m older than I look. We maintain our youthful bloom longer here. It’s the absence of UV.”

  “‘Here’?” said Dev. His voice was warming up, losing its virgin roughness. “Where’s here?”

  “Calder’s Edge.”

  “That’s the planet? Never heard of it.”

  “No, the city. My mistake. I assumed you knew. Assumed they’d have told you in advance.”

  “Don’t assume anything where ISS are concerned, least of all that they’re considerate of my welfare. They tell me zilch, just dump me from place to place and expect me to catch up as I go along.”

  “Iota Draconis C. Also known as Alighieri.”

  “Alighieri. That’s a clue. The poet Dante’s surname. Someone has a sense of humour... or thinks he does. Thermoplanet?”

  “Extreme thermoplanet, actually, orbiting an evolved giant star just outside the Messier 101 nebula. Point-four on the Earth Similarity Index, and one notch above mercurian. It reaches six hundred degrees Celsius up on the crust. Cooler at night, but not by much.”

  “Joy.”

  “It’s slightly smaller than Earth, but denser in composition, so the gravity is more or less equivalent. You won’t notice any extra buoyancy. Alighieri has a faster rotation, too, so the days are shorter. But again, not so much that you’d notice any difference.”

  “Okay. Let me see how this feels.”

  Dev was lying supine on a form-fitting, foam-lined mediplinth. He struggled to a sitting position, then swung his legs over the side to stand. Bilk offered to help, but Dev waved him away.

  The body he had been downloaded into was short, heavyset, and muscular. Stumpier than he was accustomed to. As best he remembered, he was several centimetres taller than this.

  The hands were pale and hairy, with blunt spatulate fingers. Efficient blue-collar hands, not meant for delicate work.

  “How do I look?” he said.

  Junius Bilk set one of the floatscreens to display a realtime shot of Dev.

  Dev warily studied the face. The face he had been given. The face that wasn’t his.

  It was coarse and squashed. Rough iron-wool hair peaked from a broad, flat brow. The nose was a squatting frog, the lips chunky. He grinned without humour. Decent teeth, but big.

  Not unhandsome, he thought. Puggy, he decided. That was the word for it. Puggy. Like a boxer who’d gone a few too many rounds. The face of a man who liked a scrap, perhaps more than was good for him.

  A face he could live with, for however long he had to. Drawn from the colonist DNA bank, so he would be seeing plenty others like it on this world.

  He was stark naked, as always on arrival. He glanced down to check how well-endowed, or not, they had made him.

  They had been relatively generous this time.

  He flexed his arms, articulated his thick, spadelike fingers.

  Him, but not him. A new car for the driver that was Dev Harmer. A new extension of himself. A bespoke temporary home.

  “Commplant is operational whenever you want it,” said Bilk. “You have clearance for full access to Alighieri’s insite and communications network, plus standard bundled features like memo scribing.”

  Dev thought On, and felt the buzz of the commplant booting up, an intracerebral tingle. Within a few seconds the unit was synchronised, initialised and awaiting use. A mental cursor winked. He sensed addresses, social media, shared personal data, contact numbers, all lurking behind a partition, accessible as and when necessary.

  He set a firewall password: leatherhill1000. Then he powered the commplant down. No point wasting energy. Even idle mode burned calories.

  “Clothes,” he said, but Bilk had anticipated the request.

  The outfit consisted of underwear, an undershirt, and a basic, utilitarian set of dungaree-like overalls, accompanied by thick-soled, sturdy boots. The fabrics were flimsy and breathable. Keeping warm must not be a priority on Alighieri. Likewise fashionability.

  “And this.” Bilk held out a reinforced cap, similar to a hardhat, made from keratin derivatives.

  “Really?”

  “Not obligatory, but folks prefer to wear them outdoors. An umbrella in case of rain.”

  Dev took the cap, but didn’t put it on. The impressions he was forming of Alighieri – none of them filled him with delight.

  Thermoplanet. Well short of the inner limit of its system’s Goldilocks zone, seared by solar radiation. Human-inhospitable surface. Subterranean habitation only. The principal industry, if he didn’t miss his guess, would be mining.

  It certainly wouldn’t be tourism.

  Once, just once, couldn’t Interstellar Security Solutions send him somewhere that was a solid “1” on the Earth Similarity Index? A place boasting balmy blue skies and gorgeous sugary beaches. A resort planet, perhaps, with five-star hotels, spas, fine wine, and beautiful bored women looking for some uncomplicated, no-strings fun.

  He knew the answer already.

  Because bad shit didn’t happen on nice, cosy resort planets. Bad shit happened on the fringes of the Terran Diaspora, out by the Border Wall, on planets that had covetable natural resources or were of strategic importance.

  “Other environment-specific physiological attributes you should be aware of,” said Bilk. “Every native-born Alighierian has them, through heritable genes.” He counted off on his fingers. “One, haemoglobin with a high oxygen affinity. Good air is at a premium down here. Two, hyper-efficient thermoregulation, with an increased epidermal vasodilation and eccrine gland response.”

  “Translation?”

  “The blood vessels in your skin dilate easily in order to shed heat from your bloodstream through convection, and you sweat a lot.”

  “Nice.”

  “Three, lowered body temperature. You won’t feel cold, though, because the ambient warmth is so high. As for the sweating, try not to overtax yourself aerobically, drink plenty of fluids, and you’ll be fine. Finally, four, your kidneys have been tweaked to produce higher concentrations of the prohormone calcitriol. This counteracts the almost total absence of naturally-synthesised vitamin D due to lack of exposure to sunlight.”

  “Right,” Dev said. He was hungry. Famished, in fact. The host form was pristine. It hadn’t been fed yet. Fresh from the growth vat and craving nutrition.

  But first things first. Info, then food.

  “Briefing,” he said.

  Bilk nodded. “I was warned you were the straight-down-to-business type. The profile they sent me –”

  “Is just some human resources crap. Piece of fiction. Reduces me to a bunch of bullet points and Myers-Briggs personality metrics. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “The prof
ile said that’s exactly what you would say about it.”

  “Do you want to get on my wrong side, Mr Bilk?”

  “No sir, Mr Harmer.”

  “Then don’t get clever with me. Briefing. Come on. Why have I been inserted here? What’s going on that needs the attention of an ISS troubleshooter?”

  “Well, it’s fairly simple,” Bilk began. “Starting just a few weeks back, we’ve been experiencing –”

  The room trembled. The floatscreens flickered, readouts scattering into zigzag lines. Cupboard doors rattled in their frames. Shelves and their contents shook. The already dim lighting dimmed further.

  Dev felt a deep vibrato hum through the soles of his feet, a sound with a pulse, like a singer reaching some unfathomably low bass note. He gripped the edge of the gurney. It wasn’t that he was going to topple over; more that he found it hard to keep his legs from crumpling.

  The noise faded. Stability returned.

  “Right on cue,” said Bilk with grim relish. “This is exactly the problem. We’ve been experiencing tremors just like that, and worse, more severe, on a regular basis. No one’s sure what’s causing them or what they signify. They don’t appear to have any natural cause. Calder’s Edge doesn’t lie in a region of seismic activity. It would never have been built here otherwise. There’s been nothing like this in all of Alighieri’s known history.”

  “No geological evidence dating back to pre-colonial times?”

  “Not as far as we can determine. It just seems that –”

  And then it resumed, like thunder. The room heaved and yawed. Some titanic fist was punching, pounding, pummelling from outside. Walls appeared to flex, solid structures turning to liquid.