Dan Abnett - Border Princes

Unless they hatched.

Mostly, they went away again without hatching after a few months. Just went away, or simply died and were ejected, into a Kleenex or during a sneeze, without their place of residence ever knowing about it. It was unnecessarily difficult and risky to try to remove them in their fugue state: better by far, for the health of the host, to allow them go to away of their own accord.

But, one time in ten, they pupated and advanced to the next phase of their haphazard, incomprehensible life cycle. That one time in ten required swift reaction. Fighter Command.

Sudden elevations in alpha-wave patterns were a reliable overture to hatching. As soon as the Peeters had been identified as Droon carriers, Toshiko and Owen had snuck into their house one afternoon and wired it with pattern monitors.

‘Spike’s increasing,’ Owen said, checking his compact scanner. His Bluetooth carried his words to the others.

Jack rang the bell.

Mrs Peeters was a nice, elderly lady with a terrible head-cold. She squinted at Jack and Gwen with swollen, half-shut eyes.

‘We’re from the Gas Board,’ said Jack, igniting a toothy smile.

That didn’t seem especially credible to Mrs Peeters. A pretty girl in a black bomber jacket and a matinee idol in a greatcoat, both of them wearing clear plastic pac-a-macs over the top of their outer clothes. Sniffing and rubbing her nose on a hankie, she asked to see some proper ID.

With a simple, deft gesture, Jack showed her an audio paddle instead. By the time Mrs Peeters had realised the thing in his hand wasn’t a laminated ID, the paddle — a matt-black plastic instrument the size and shape of a flattened salad server — was pressed against her forehead and Jack had thumbed the small, red ‘on’ switch.

Mrs Peeters took it rather well, all things considered. She let out a sharp moan, staggered backwards with her fingers pressed to her temples, and pressurised slime cannoned out of her violated nostrils.

‘Catch her,’ Jack advised.

Gwen was already doing so. She secured Mrs Peeters’ falling form around the shoulders, dragged her quickly and gently into the hall, and lowered her onto the hall runner. Jack stepped inside behind them, and closed the front door.

Mrs Peeters was effectively unconscious, but her body bucked and rocked with involuntary coughs and throaty choking noises. An impressively noxious quantity of viscous yellow mucus was flowing from her mouth and nose.

‘Recovery position,’ said Jack. ‘Keep her airway clear.’

‘Doing it,’ Gwen replied. She had rolled Mrs Peeters onto her side, and reached her fingers into the lady’s spluttering mouth, pulling out globules of mucal matter. Thank God for surgical gloves. And pac-a-macs. The blast pattern of Mrs Peeters’ first sneeze covered the front of Jack’s plastic slicker like glue.

‘Give her another go,’ Gwen said.

Jack bent down and administered the paddle to Mrs Peeters’ head again. As they hatched, the Droon were especially vulnerable to infrasonic bursts.

Mrs Peeters began to rack and cough more violently. A much more considerable flood of mucus began to pour out of her head, thick and soft like sugar icing.

‘Oh, that’s nasty,’ said Gwen, hard at work.

A voice called out from somewhere. A man’s voice, calling his wife’s name between phlegmy coughs.

‘Tosh?’ Jack advised over his headset.

At the back of the house, in a dew-damp garden of mature apple trees and hydrangeas, Toshiko and James started to move. James had already popped the catch on the French windows.

The back room was a sitting room, with a handsome baby grand and antimacassars over the chair backs. An aspidistra stood on a jardinière beside a rack of sheet music. A number of school photographs hung on the walls; tiers of uniformed kids staring at the camera in landscape format.

James and Toshiko went out into the hallway. The voice floated down from upstairs. ‘Viv? Who is it? Who’s that at the door?’

Back down the hall, by the front door, Jack and Gwen were dealing with Mrs Peeters. The poor woman was emitting wet, splattery sneezes and gurgles.

Without waiting for further instruction, James and Toshiko went up stairs.

‘Whoo! Really spiking now!’ Owen warned over the link.

‘Understood,’ replied James. An upper landing, with a blanket box and some framed watercolours and mezzotints of Snowdonia. A rattling, fluid cough coming from a nearby bedroom.

Mr Peeters had taken to his bed the day before. The room smelled of menthol and cough linctus. There were two boxes of tissues beside the rumpled bed. Mr Peeters had made it to the doorway, unsteady and flushed. He was wearing flannelette pyjamas and a worried expression.

‘Who…?’ he began to say.

‘Health visitors,’ said Toshiko smoothly. ‘Your wife called us.’

‘Just sit back down on the bed, Mr Peeters,’ said James, ‘you ought not to be walking around.’

Mr Peeters was too poorly to argue. He allowed himself to be manoeuvred back onto the bed. He was still confused, flu-stupid. He sneezed, and snot hung from his left nostril like an icicle.

Toshiko helped him wipe with a tissue.

‘Why are you wearing plastic macs?’ the elderly man asked.

‘It’s raining,’ said Toshiko.

‘Just going to take your temperature, Mr Peeters,’ said James, producing an audio paddle.

‘There we go,’ said Jack. Gwen had already spotted it in the pooling mucus. A wriggling blob, pale blue and sickly, about the size of a cockroach. Jack fished in with the stainless steel tongs, grabbed the blob out of the jellied goo and bagged it.

‘Watch closely,’ said Jack, ‘there may be more than one.’

‘What’s the maximum you’ve ever seen?’ asked Gwen.

‘Six,’ said Jack.

‘From one nose?’

‘Unlikely as it seems.’

‘There’s another!’ Gwen announced, with distaste.

This blob was more active, its blue casing slightly ruptured to reveal something sharper and blacker inside. It wriggled away across the parquet flooring.

There was no time for finesse with the tongs. Jack grabbed it with his gloved hands and shook it off his fingers into another baggie. He held the baggie up to the light and shook it, studying the tiny, grotesque thing wiggling inside.

‘Just in time,’ Jack said. ‘That one had almost shed.’

Mrs Peeters had gone into a paroxysm of gagging coughs. The matter flowing out of her mouth and nose was thinner suddenly. Watery snot streaked with blood. The pool on the floor widened.

‘Any more?’ Gwen asked.

Jack scanned the woman. ‘No,’ he said, but he gave Mrs Peeters a third blast with the paddle to make sure. ‘Her body is just voiding now,’ Jack said. ‘Cleaning out the nest. Go put the kettle on.’

Toshiko extracted the third organism from Mr Peeters’ phlegm-stoppered mouth and cleared his airway. She’d had to take the old man’s false teeth out. The thing clamped in the jaws of her tongs was almost all the way out of its pale blue casing. It had begun to unfold. Black, barbed, needle limbs the length and thickness of pencils quivered as they filled with ichor and began to inflate.

‘Yuck,’ she said.

‘Kill it,’ said James. ‘It’s too well formed to just bag.’

With a grimace, Toshiko dropped the emerging thing into a bag, put the bag on the corner of the bedside cabinet and flattened it with a sharp blow from a hardback Wilbur Smith.

‘I think he’s clear,’ said Jack. He had Mr Peeters’ limp form rolled forward and well supported, so that the muck drooling out of him could pour onto the bedroom carpet. There was a lot of it, like wallpaper paste stained with brown sauce.

Toshiko scanned the unfortunate ex-history teacher.