But as it happens, we drive right up to the front door and park outside without any trouble. The door opens, and there is a cry of “Go! Go! Go!” as Partridge’s gang jump out and serve their no-knock warrant—a shotgun with a breaching round into the front door lock, followed by a size twelve boot. This is not Anytown USA and our guys aren’t a steroid-enraged SWAT team, so they do not follow through with flash-bangs and indiscriminate gunfire, but there is a lot of shouting and brandishing of automatic weapons as they rush the lobby.
Chris and I watch the streaming camera feed from Sergeant Harry’s helmet as he grabs a look around the corner of the door. It opens into a corridor with other doors—offices, by the look of it—to either side. The walls are flimsy partitions with windows backed by venetian blinds: not exactly defensible. I’m climbing down from my seat when someone finally opens one of the doors, takes a look up the corridor, and slams the door with a muffled shriek of terror. Okay, so not a janitor, but not a suicidal gunman either. The sergeant followed by Johnny and three soldiers race into the corridor and take up defensive positions while two more apply boots to the door, which the presumed-harmless occupant vanished into. And then I’m out of the truck, Ms. Womack tagging along behind me, and we get inside.
“Police!” shouts one of the soldiers, which is not entirely untrue—several of them hold commissions in the Royal Military Police—“on the floor, get down! Who’s in charge here? No, stay on the floor and don’t move!” There is much thundering of boots as doors are slammed open to either side until the sergeant and his backup confirm that there is nothing here but offices, and that the only person they’ve found is—surprise—a very confused janitor.
“I think this is my cue,” Chris comments as she steps past me and addresses the janitor. “Ah, hello there. Are you the only person here right now, or is there someone in charge? I have a court order to serve—”
I stay in the corridor because something is not quite right. I can tell it by the prickling in my thumbs and the whispering voices in the back of my head. The guy Chris has pounced on is harmless enough, but the crackling paper-dry dreams of the deep-dwelling tongue eaters that have haunted me ever since Denver are close to the surface here.
“Are the records we need here?” asks Captain Partridge. “Or are there more offices deeper inside?” He catches my expression and shrugs. “Had to ask. Smith, McIntyre, up here; Mr. Howard, could you help Mr. McTavish check the floor—”
“Got a feeling about this, ’ave we?” asks Johnny as I approach the end of the corridor, where he’s crouched beside Sergeant Harry.
I raise a finger, then close my eyes and listen.
Without the distraction of other senses, it’s a lot clearer. Beyond the end of the corridor there’s a larger space, and wards, and beyond the wards I sense the faintly discernible flavor of decomposing souls, minds half-dissolved by the parasitic hosts that have captured them. “Contacts thataway,” I murmur, pointing off to the left of the door, then moving my hand to indicate an upper floor. “Multiple contacts, at least three groups moving, and there’s a, a spawning pool—” I can hear the narcotic crooning of the host-mother surrounded by her immature offspring, a giant underwater wood louse from hell. It wants me to open my mouth and take it in so that it can make me complete, to bring me into communion with its god. “Ward up, it’s going to be messy.”
“So that’s a yes, then,” Johnny says grimly, shouldering his monstrous assault shotgun.
My sense that things are about to go wrong suddenly comes into sharp focus. The sources of chittering white noise are moving, and while some are upstairs there’s something below us. “Take cover!” I shout, and stop being Bob as I open myself to the Eater of Souls. And then everything goes to hell.
*
“HUMMINGBIRD One confirms Schiller’s party has arrived at their target,” Gary announces. “He’s out of the game for now.”
“And the guards?” Mhari leans across the desk towards him.
“Guards could be problematic,” Persephone comments from the far side of the lounge area, near the short corridor leading to the lobby. She’s peeled back the carpet and underfelt and is marking out an intricate circular design about a meter in diameter on the exposed concrete with a conductive pen, connected by wires to a couple of small project boxes stacked neatly to one side. She’s swapped her usual couture style for a cut-price ninja outfit: black leggings and sweater worn under a military webbing vest slung with equipment pouches. “I’m nearly through here. Could do with a hand, Madge?”
“Don’t call me that.” Mhari’s voice is even and overcontrolled.
Persephone flashes her a feral grin. Her eyes sparkle; she’s clearly having the time of her life. “Got your attention, didn’t it? Johnny was right.”
“I will strangle that man, I swear it.” Mhari stalks over to the circle. “What do you need?”
“A drop of your blood.” Persephone produces a sterile needle.
“You cannot be … eep! Serious!”
“Can and am.” Persephone holds Mhari’s finger over the circular grid until a drop of blood splashes onto it, then passes her a pad of cotton wool and a plaster. “My turn.” She stabs herself with a fresh needle, baptizes the grid, then flicks a switch on one of the small black boxes. “This is really neat: it’ll only let as many people come back as go down, so if we land in a nest of hornets we just climb up again and they can’t follow us. It’s good for about two hours.”
“Then?” Mhari stares at her as the silvery lines inked on the concrete turn black and begin to glow and warp, as if sucking the light out of the air around them. A faint chittering tickles her nerves, rising from the trapped cognitive parasites in the storage ring.
“Then the batteries run down and I have to set it up all over again. Only the next time it’ll take rather more blood.”
“How much more?”
“About three PHANGs full. So let’s not do that.”
Now Persephone plugs the other breadboard box into the first one, and adjusts a dial on the front. “Underfloor space is fifty centimeters, then there’s twelve of cement, then underceiling space of thirty, then a three-meter air gap to the next concrete level, twelve centimeters of rebar and cement, then another underceiling space of thirty, then we’re into Schiller’s suite—call it two-fifty centimeters to the carpet. I make that six eighty-five. If I set this for a drop of four-fifty that should bring us out about a third of a meter under the ceiling. Advantage of that is that it’ll be too high for us to decapitate ourselves if we walk into it edge-on by accident. Disadvantage: we’ll need a chain ladder. Like, oh, this one I packed earlier.” Persephone gives Mhari a grin that is every bit as sharp as a PHANG’s canines. “And it completely bypasses the ghosties and ghoulies roaming the floor below us.”
Mhari nods cautiously. “Ghosties and ghoulies.”
“Technical term. Don’t tell me you can’t hear them? Nice doggies, those Hounds, just don’t let them touch you or catch you in a rectilinear killing zone.”
“Oh yuck.” Mhari pauses. “So it’s show time like, now? I’d better change.”