‘Now,’ said Casey, ‘we’ve already ripped the cryogenics facility apart, and we dug up a lot of stuff, but the other two places we’ve only scouted at a distance. That’s mainly because they both sit more or less directly on the territorial borders between the two Hives that dominate the city. Bee-brains from either Hive have been fighting whenever they run into each other. If we wait too long, could be they’ll wind up demolishing Retièn’s labs and offices before we get a chance to look inside.’

‘How certain are we that Retièn is responsible for the extinction event here?’ asked Haden.

‘Near as damn sure,’ Casey replied. ‘We’re going in as two teams to do a quick reconnoitre and grab every piece of computer equipment or paperwork we can load in the cars before rendezvousing back here no later than nightfall.’

‘What happened to the people here?’ I asked, wondering yet again what possible use the Authority could have for such information.

‘They were all infected by a highly modified variant of Toxoplasma Gondii,’ explained Winifred.

I looked at her. ‘And that is?’

‘A parasitic agent that normally triggers suicidal behaviour in some mammalian species in its unaltered form, particularly rats and mice,’ she explained. ‘At heart, it reprogrammes mammalian behaviour via infection. Imagine being able to spray a whole advancing army with a gene-spliced variant so they all went crazy, or turned on each other. Or even better, it made them so terrified of the enemy that they put down their weapons and ran away.’

‘And how does that connect to those things over there on the horizon?’ I asked, nodding at the Hives.

‘Somewhere down the line,’ said Winifred, ‘they got funding from the military to create genetic chimeras, through new gene recombination techniques they’d developed. It seems the original idea was to use genetically modified insects as a vector for delivering the parasite. Something went wrong, and a very unpleasant mutation got loose and interbred with the local bee populations. Then the bees infected people, and they in turn became active vectors for spreading the infection yet further. It took maybe a year for the entire globe to be subsumed. The people here are still alive, but . . . they aren’t really people any more.’ She shook her head wistfully. ‘I’d kill for the opportunity to carry out a long-term study of the bee-brains. They’re not merely infected. They’re a kind of chimera themselves, almost a new species, in fact, born of a symbiotic relationship that reached its apotheosis in the night patrols.’

‘You had shots, right?’ said Casey, before I had a chance to ask Winifred what a ‘night patrol’ was.

‘Sure,’ I said, rubbing at the exposed skin of my arm as if I had already been stung. The sound of buzzing insects in the nearby woods now took on an ominous quality.