“So whatever’s grabbing people is only able to get at those people nearest the walls!” I said.
Farley fought his way into the crowd, yelling for everyone to stand together in the middle of the club and stay well away from the walls. Nobody argued. They were happy to go along with anything that might make them feel a little safer. They huddled together, back to back and shoulder to shoulder, glaring about them, defying any outsider to come too near. They all had some kind of weapon at the ready now. Everything from machine pistols to energy guns, enchanted knuckle-dusters to aboriginal pointing bones. We’re an eclectic bunch at the Wulfshead.
There were even a few pieces of alien tech being brandished, dangerous enough to make me feel distinctly nervous. On the grounds that they looked powerful enough to destroy the whole club and everyone in it. I just hoped no one started shooting at shadows, because the moment one started, everyone else would be bound to join in.
I wanted very much to call on my armour so I could protect the crowd, as much as myself. But if I did that, everyone would know Shaman Bond was really a Drood. My cover identity would be lost forever. And I liked being Shaman Bond. I wasn’t ready to give him up just yet. I put my right hand to my forehead, subvocalised the activating Words, and allowed just a trickle of strange matter to run down my neck from my torc, and then streak along my arm to my raised hand, until it could jump onto my face and form a pair of golden sunglasses. With so much going on around me, I was pretty sure no one would notice anything. And with the golden sunglasses in place, I could suddenly See the whole situation a great deal more clearly. I could See everything that was there, including the things I wasn’t supposed to see.
The problem was the club’s plasma screens. The huge screens covering the walls. Someone had tapped into them from Outside, and was watching everything that was going on inside the club from the other side of the screens. I could See them, dark figures sitting and listening on the far side of every screen-though they were almost certainly some distance away in reality.
This was how the secrets had been getting out. And no one had noticed because the screens were part of the club. Just taken for granted. They probably hadn’t been physically altered, nothing to give away their new nature; they just had their signals piggybacked, so that the sound and vision went both ways.
I jumped up onto the bar and shouted at the crowd. Every eye and every weapon were immediately turned on me.
“It’s the plasma screens!” I said. “Someone’s made them two-way! Someone’s looking in from Outside, so they can see and hear everything that happens here! And now they must be reaching through the screens to take people!”
I really shouldn’t have been surprised when everyone present immediately opened fire on every plasma screen at once. I jumped down just in time and huddled up against the bar as all kinds of firepower were unleashed. The din was almost unbearable in the confined space. But when the shooting died raggedly away, and I looked up again, I saw that not a single screen had been so much as cracked. Whoever had tapped into them had clearly also reinforced them with all kinds of protections.
Everyone stood very still, looking around, and then a whole bunch of dark hands burst out of every plasma screen at once, on the end of rapidly elongating dark, rubbery arms. The hands shot forward with incredible speed, grabbed the nearest people, and dragged them bodily towards the plasma screens, struggle as they might.
The dark hands clamped onto arms and shoulders with inhuman strength. Sometimes that was enough, if the victims had been caught off guard and off balance. The victims were dragged over to the screens, and then into and through them, all in a moment. If the victims fought back, then the hands would just hold them in place long enough for their arms to whip round and round them, wrapping them in dark, unrelenting coils. And then the arms would retract, dragging the still struggling victims through the plasma screens to whatever awaited them on the other side. People everywhere screamed and swore and fired their weapons wildly, and none of it did any good at all.
Of course, the kind of people you get at the Wulfshead Club often aren’t the type to depend on weapons. Many were powerful enough or crafty enough to put up a fight on their own.
Monkton Farley ducked back and forth, hiding behind other people, using them as shields while he put his great mind to the problem of how to shut down the screens. He was already assembling an impressive bit of tech from various things he dug out of his pockets.
Ellen de Gustibus grabbed the nearest dark arm as it shot past her, held it firmly in place with both of her hands, and then took a large bite out of it. It bucked and jerked spasmodically as Ellen chewed her way through it. There wasn’t any blood that I could see.
Waterloo Lillian stabbed an aboriginal bone at a dark hand as it went for him, and the hand just withered and fell apart. The attached arm disintegrated into dust. But even as Lillian whooped loudly in triumph, another dark arm looped itself quickly around him from behind. Half a dozen coils were enough to pin his arms to his sides, and then they squeezed hard, crushing all the breath out of him. The bone fell from Lillian’s nerveless fingers, and his mascaraed eyes rolled up in his head. The arm dragged him off to the nearest screen.
Jumping Jack Flashman had already discovered he couldn’t get out of the club. The main security shields were still in place. So he just went teleporting back and forth around the interior, appearing and disappearing before the hands or arms could get a grip on him. One dark arm did whip around him, but he was gone again before it could tighten. The next time he reappeared, though, a dark hand was waiting for him, hanging on the air. It formed itself into a fist and punched him hard in the side of the head the moment he appeared. The arm caught his unconscious body before it could hit the ground, looped around him, and hauled him away.
Whoever was in control on the other side of the plasma screens, it was clear they were no longer content just to take secrets. With their presence blown, they were taking the people who knew the secrets. And even with all this mayhem going on around me, I still couldn’t help wondering . . . who could be brave enough, or stupid enough, or just plain desperate enough to make enemies of the club management? And all the friends and families and organisations attached to the people they’d taken? Even my family would hesitate to make so many significant dangerous enemies at once.
It wouldn’t stop them, but they’d definitely think about it first.
A dark hand on the end of a rapidly lengthening arm came flying directly at me, only to slam to a halt at the very last moment. It hung quivering on the air, just a few inches short of my face, and then turned away, in search of another victim. I put a hand to my throat, where my torc was tingling wildly. The hand had detected the torc and turned away rather than antagonise the Droods. Which was . . . interesting. I looked quickly around, and then sent another trickle of golden strange matter down my arm, under my sleeve, to form an armoured glove over my right hand. I needed to do something before I was left standing alone in an empty club.
A dark hand flew past me. I grabbed it out of mid-air and crushed it with my golden glove. I felt bones crack and break in my grasp; and when I let the hand go, it whipped quickly back inside the nearest screen. Through my golden spectacles I watched it go, and saw vague figures moving agitatedly back and forth on the other side of the screen. One of them was clutching his hand to his chest, as though it was injured. And another figure . . . was quite definitely giving orders to the others. I punched the screen before me with my golden hand, and instead of cracking or breaking, the screen just let my armoured hand pass right through, into the place behind.
I concentrated hard, and my armour connected with the screen’s operating systems, infiltrating their command structures. And then it seemed like the easiest thing in the world for me to reach all the way through the screen and grab the figure who’d been giving all the orders. I took a firm hold and hauled him back through the screen and into the Wulfshead Club. I threw him to the floor and stood over him . . . and was quietly astonished to discover that I knew him.