Century Rain Part 43

"I don't know what any of this is about, Aveling. Right now I'm not even sure I want to know. Can we just get this over with?"

"You won't be able to return just yet," he said. "We're still having some difficulties with the link."

Another train rumbled through the nearby tunnel, the vibration of its pa.s.sage dislodging dust from the ceiling of the access shaft.

"Due to the temporary problem you said would be fixed by now?"

"It's proving to be a little less temporary than we were hoping." Aveling stopped and shone the torch ahead of them, aiming the beam along the gentle curve of the shaft.

Auger saw his frown. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing. I just thought I heard something."

"Probably one of your own people at the portal end," Auger suggested.

Aveling unzipped his jacket and slid the papers snugly inside. "Come on. Let's move on."

Auger couldn't help noticing that he had slipped an automatic out of his jacket at the same time as he hid

the papers. The locally made weapon gleamed an oily blue in the torchlight.

"I saw something move," Auger said suddenly, dropping her voice to a whisper.

The torch beam skittered ahead of them like a nervous animal. "Where?"

"Down the tunnel. Looked like a person, crouching against the wall." She caught her breath, then added,

"It almost looked like a child."

"A child? Don't be silly."

"A child could easily have found their way down here."

Aveling shook his head, but she could see that he was rattled. She didn't blame him. She had not

enjoyed her previous journey along this tunnel, and she certainly wasn't enjoying this one.

"Is anyone there?" Aveling called. "Anyone from the portal? Barton-is that you?"

"It wasn't Barton," Auger said. "Or Skellsgard, either."

Aveling fired off a warning shot. The muzzle of the automatic spat orange flame into darkness, the bullet

crunching through rock a dozen metres ahead of them. After the report of the gun had faded, echoes

marching up and down the shaft for a few tense moments, there was only silence and their own

breathing.

"d.a.m.n," Aveling said.

"You saw something?"

"I think I saw something. But maybe it was just you planting the suggestion in my head."

"You heard something before I saw the child," Auger pointed out.

"I thought I saw something as well," Aveling said, sounding a good deal less sure of himself.

"Something like a child?"

"It wasn't a child. If it was a child, then there was something badly..." But he left the remark

uncompleted.

"Something's not right here," Auger said. She pressed him against the wall, silencing him with a hiss.

"You know it."

"We're just seeing shadows."

"Or something's gone wrong. I know what I saw. I wasn't imagining it, even if you think you were."

He answered her with a hiss of his own, all the while aiming the muzzle of the automatic along the shaft.

She noticed that his hand was shaking badly.

"So what are you saying?" he snapped.

"I'm saying we should get out of here before we walk any further into trouble."

"Look," Aveling said as the torchlight suddenly came to rest on something on the floor, ten or twelve

metres further down the tunnel. "That's a body."

It was too big to be a child. "I think that might be Barton," Auger said, with a kind of hopeless inevitability. "I think that might be Barton, and I think he might be dead."

"Not possible," Aveling said.

He pulled free from her grip and moved further ahead, taking the torch with him. The light bobbed down

the tunnel until Aveling reached the body. He knelt and inspected the dead man, the gun still shaking in his grip.

"This is bad," he muttered. Auger forced herself to join him by the body. Up close, there was no doubt that it was Barton. Aveling played the torch over the corpse, lingering over a cl.u.s.ter of bullet holes in the man's chest. There must have been twenty individual wounds, overlapping like lunar craters. They were tightly s.p.a.ced, as if they had been fired in rapid succession at close range. His fingers were still curled lightly around the grip of another automatic. Auger pulled the gun free. Barton's hand was still warm.

"Now let's get out of here," she said.

Aveling's arm jerked as he squeezed off another two shots into the darkness. In the muzzle flash, Auger

thought she saw something as well: a small doll-like figure scurrying along close to the rough-hewn tunnel wall. The child-sized figure wore a red dress, but the face she had seen in the instant of the flash had not been that of a child at all, but something wizened and feral: half-hag, half-ghoul, with a vile grin full of sharp, blackened teeth. The automatic felt heavy in her hands as she pointed it into the darkness and tried to aim at the spot where she thought the scurrying figure would be by now. She clicked the trigger, but nothing happened. Cursing her stupidity, she fumbled for the safety catch and tried again, but Barton must have already emptied the clip.

"We're in a lot of trouble," Aveling said. He stood up, keeping his knees bent in a crouch, and began to back away from the body.

"I definitely saw something that time," Auger said, still holding the gun. "It looked like a child...but when I saw the face-"

"It wasn't a child," Aveling said.

"You were expecting something, weren't you?"

"Go to the top of the cla.s.s."

Useless as it was, she couldn't help but press the muzzle of the empty automatic against him. "Start talking to me, you pig." That was not the word she'd had in mind, but "pig" was the worst she could bring herself to utter, even under these stressful circ.u.mstances. "The child's from E1, isn't she?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Because whatever it is doesn't belong here. Now tell me what you know."

"It's an NI infiltration unit," Aveling said heavily. He danced the torch beam around the walls, but there was no sign of the child.

"A what?"

"Oh, come on, Auger. Surely you remember that nasty little war we don't like to talk about nowadays? Against our friends in the Federation of Polities?"

"What about it?"

"They sent their children against us. The Neotenic Infantry: genetically engineered, cloned, psychologically programmed killing machines, packaged to look like children."

Despite herself, she couldn't help but be moved by the horror she heard in his voice. Anything that left that kind of a scar on a man like Aveling, she thought, had to be bad news.

"Did you fight against them?" she asked.

"I engaged them. It's not always the same thing. Those vicious little creatures could crawl into s.p.a.ces we thought were secure and hide for weeks, somehow surviving on zero rations...silent, waiting like coiled snakes, almost in a coma...until they emerged." His breathing was becoming ragged as he slipped deeper into memories. "They were difficult to kill. Fast, strong, wound-tolerant...pain threshold off the scale. Highly attuned sense of self-preservation...and yet perfectly willing to die to serve a mission objective. And even when we knew what they were, even when we had a clear line of sight...it was almost impossible to turn our weapons on them. They looked like children. We were fighting four billion years of evolution telling us we shouldn't squeeze that trigger."

"War babies," Auger said. "That was what we called them, wasn't it?"

"So you do remember your history." His mocking tone did nothing to disguise his fear.

She thought back to Ca.s.sandra, the Slasher representative who had pa.s.sed as an adolescent on the mission that had got her into this mess in the first place. The Neotenic Infantry had been a step towards the emergence of entire factions of child-sized Slashers. But it had also been a step that no one liked to talk about now, least of all the Slashers.

"I remember that they were a genetic dead end. They didn't work out well. They were mentally unstable and they wore out fast."

"They were weapons," Aveling said, "designed with a specific shelf life."

"But no one's seen any war babies for twenty, thirty years, Aveling. Please tell me what one is doing in a tunnel under Paris in E2."

"Figure it out for yourself, Auger. The Slashers are here. They already have a presence in E2."

Suddenly she felt very cold and very scared, and very far from home. "We have to get back to the surface."

"No," Aveling said, regaining some of his nerve. "We must get to the portal. The portal absolutely cannot be compromised."

"It must already be compromised if they're here. How else did they arrive?"

Aveling started to say something, but seemed to have trouble getting his words out. He made a phlegmy choking sound and fell heavily against Auger, torch and gun dropping to the floor. Auger drew breath in to scream: it was a natural human reaction, given that the person next to her had just been killed. But somehow she held it in. Shaking, concentrating on acting rather than thinking, she reached for the torch and replaced Barton's useless automatic with the one Aveling had been carrying.

Keeping low, she shone the torch down the shaft and by some accident managed to pin the child to the wall with the fat circle of the beam. The light paralysed the child for a moment. It looked at her with its, horrid, shrivelled travesty of a face, wrinkled and bloodless lips framing a devilish, broken-toothed grin.

They wore out fast.

A dry, black tongue moved between the lips. In its tiny claw of a hand it held what she a.s.sumed was a gun, which it raised towards Auger. She fired first, aiming the automatic in the general direction of the child. The weapon kicked violently back against her palm as it discharged. Auger let out a small, anguished yelp of pain and surprise as the child creased in the middle and fell out of the spotlight cast by the torch. Its weapon clattered to the ground and the child let out a vile, draining shriek, like steam escaping from a boiling kettle.

Every instinct told Auger to run back the way she had come, back to daylight. She knew that there might be more of these creatures in the tunnel. But she had to see what she had killed or maimed.

She walked up to it, the gun still heavy in her hand, trusting that there was at least one more bullet in the magazine but preferring not to know for sure. The child's shrieking was dying away, becoming a faint, almost rhythmic moan.

She kicked the child's weapon away and knelt down next to the body. The mop of black hair on top of the creature's head had slipped to one side, exposing a wrinkled, age-spotted skull, pale and hairless. Up close, in the unforgiving light of the torch, the child's face was all sagging folds and bruised welts. It looked like perished rubber beneath a cracking layer of smudged make-up. The eyes were a rheumy shade of yellow. The teeth were rotten black stubs behind which the swollen black ma.s.s of a diseased tongue moved like some imprisoned monster, attempting to form coherent sounds between each wheezing moan. The child had a disgusting smell about it, like the recesses of an inst.i.tutional kitchen.