Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER SIX

UNORTHOPTERA

FOR A LONG moment the storm of insects just hung above them in the air, absurdly, impossibly. No way for the human mind to read anything in it save malevolence, because why else would a million giant bugs just be waiting? Then they were coming down and the three Firewalkers grabbed at all the handles inside the ’Bug for the battering they were surely due.

Mao was hunched down on the back seat, low as he could go. The dark windows revealed a frantic chaos of long, barbed legs, of flashing, filmy wings. He half expected the view to be occluded by exploded bug guts as the monsters just blundered at top speed into the sides of the vehicle, but they kept landing on the car, crawling about as though to show off their anatomy to the horrified humans, then taking off again. Each explosive departure was heavy enough to rattle the Rumblebug on its suspension.

And yet the violence of the storm never quite touched them. The insects dropped onto the car, tasted it with their antennae, gaped their blunt mandibles in threat but then departed again, hunting other prey.

“Did goddamn Okereke make these things?” Lupé demanded. “This is what came out of the lab, right? This is what ate his people!”

“It’s impossible. They’re too big.” Hotep’s hands were hammering at the dashboard, a drumming within to compete with the drumming without. “They’re… not alive. They are alive. They’re… somewhere in between. There’s a signal. Many signals.” She stopped her racket for a moment to adjust her goggles. “I have comms, a thousand comms, a network between them. They’re like a single remote entity.”

“They’re machines?” Mao demanded, because frankly he’d prefer that.

“Yes. No. Yes.” Hotep went back to drumming madly as she leant forwards to stare through the window at a pulsating abdomen. “They look… alive, organic. But I’m seeing distributed components, like someone grew machinery, nanocircuitry. This is incredible. I never heard of anything like this.”

And when Cory ‘They had better everything on the Celeste’ Dello said that, you sat up and took notice.

“Look what they’re doing!” Lupé exclaimed.

Mao reluctantly un-hunched to get a better look out the window, past all the crawling bodies and hooked chitin feet. The main body of the swarm was all around them, and for a moment he thought they’d come to strip the cactus garden bare. Which would have been fine: let the goddamn beetles eat all the ornamental shrubs they wanted. Except that wasn’t what they were grazing on.

All around, the monstrous insects were dropping on the solar fields that had powered the Fontaine mansion. Working swiftly, brutally, they were scissoring away great slices of panel, grinding them down to the bare metal stumps and posts of their mountings and then flying off again, their legs making a cage of irregular fragments. Like the locusts of old had stripped fields and forests, so these monsters were denuding the land of the black collectors, leaving only twisted metal stubble in their wake.

More kept arriving, and Lupé was just shaking her head.

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