Broken Hero (8 page)

Hannah shakes her head. “Fucking hell.”

I look at her again. And there is nothing in particular about her to dislike. But she feels like a stumble in our gearwork. I just hope this case is small enough to allow us to work around it. So she can do her rotation, or penance here, or whatever reason she’s turned up, and move on, and we can get back to normal, to stability.

We stand. Kayla flips her phone at Tabitha again. “What about this one?”

“You’d break him like a twig.”

A sound makes me glance at Felicity. And she actually did facepalm on that one.

All of us except Felicity wedge into the small elevator that leads up from the subterranean confines of MI37 to Oxford’s street level.

“What about that pub?” Kayla asks. “Just going to let that go feckin’ cold are we?”

This demonstrates considerably more interest in our operational procedures than Kayla usually shows. “You’re just trying to get out of carrying all Lang’s crap back to the office, aren’t you?” I say.

“Fecker,” Kayla says as sweetly as she is able, “I could carry that whole building back here without breaking a sweat.”

I have never tested the exact limits of Kayla’s strength. There is a chance this could be true. That said…

“You are still trying to get out of it, though,” I say.

“Feck, yes.”

Clyde giggles. Tabitha scowls, though she’s been doing that pretty much since birth. Hannah is still trying to look at everyone at once and not appear like she’s doing it. She is actually very good at that.

“Look,” I say, “Lang’s apartment is right here. We’ll just pick up the stuff. Then you and I can head to Scotland while Clyde and Tabitha dig through it.”

The elevator doors ping and slide open to reveal MI37’s front door.

“And me,” says Hannah.

I look at her blank faced.

“And me,” she repeats. “You forgot me. I’ll go up to Scotland too.”

“Oh yes,” I say, mentally cursing myself. I have to at least fake politeness. I reach out to open the front door. “Of cour—” I start.

And get no further.

Two enormous figures hulk on our doorstep. One has a fist upraised, as if about to knock.

In keeping with the government’s desire to keep the whole magic/aliens/oh-shit-what-is-it stuff under wraps, MI37 is a very secret organization. So its headquarters are very secret. So our front door looks a lot like the service entrance to the dubious travel agency next door. It was probably originally painted black, but is buried under such an accumulation of graffiti, fliers, and stickers advertising phone calls with women of ill repute, that it’s hard to tell. It would be the sort of doorway someone might hang around in if they wanted to smoke something illicit, except it’s right on one of the main streets leading to the train station.

It is, very much by design, an unwelcoming doorway. It is not the sort of doorway one lurks before. It is certainly not the sort of doorway one stands before with one’s fist raised.

And if the alarm bells didn’t already have me reaching for my pistol and Kayla extracting her sword from its sheath, there is always the fact that the figure’s fist appears to be made of solid bronze.

“
Nein
! No! Stop!
Achtung
! Please!”

The bronze fist is now an open bronze palm. It hovers inches before the barrel of my extended gun, glaringly on display on the busy Oxford street.

I hesitate. While it’s an assumption that probably has its roots in the grossest Hollywood assumptions, I still don’t associate asking politely with people who want to kill me.

The second’s pause gives me more time to absorb the scene. Two figures. Both of them at least eight feet tall, hunched, wreathed in heavy canvas that falls to the floor… I suppose the word is cloaks, as anachronistic as it seems. It hides their exact forms in shapeless brown folds. Heavy hoods leave their heads in shadow.

But there is still the exposed fist there, making it abundantly clear that these are the kin of the robot we fought yesterday.

“This was mistake,” says the robotic shape with its hands where I can’t see them. “I told you. We go now.” It has a thick German accent, every w replaced with a v.
Vee go now
.

“Uhrwerkmänner,” Clyde breathes behind me.

“
Gesundheit
,” says Hannah. Her pistol is also drawn, pointing over my shoulder and tickling my ear. Still, that’s some surprisingly cool nerves. At this point during my orientation I think I was curling up and crying uncle.

“No,” Clyde starts, “I mean that these are them. These are Lang’s Uhrwerk—”

“I know what you meant,” Hannah says.

“Oh.”

“We mean no harm,” says the one with its palm extended. “We come because we want to talk. To discuss with you, yes? You understand?”

I am very aware of the amount of weaponry we are showing right on our own doorstep. The bulk of the Uhrwerkmänner hides a lot of what’s going on from the cars driving by, but that bulk in and of itself is going to attract some unwanted attention. This is not the place to do this.

“Put the weapons away,” I say.

“Seriously?” Kayla and Hannah ask at the exact same moment. Synchronicity between the pair is not necessarily a reassuring development.

“Very much so.” I slide my pistol back into its holster.

I hear the sword slide home. A moment later, Hannah’s gun stops tickling my ear.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask the robot. “Yesterday one of you tried to kill us.”

A club descending
. I blink the after-image away and rub my palms dry on my trouser legs.

“Yes,” says the one with hidden hands, “yesterday you killed my friend Nils, let us talk about that.”

“No, Hermann,” says the first, turning away from me, shapes moving beneath the surface of his cloak like tectonic plates. “We are here because we need their help.” He turns back to me. “We need you to save our lives.”

I honestly had no idea we had a service entrance. Tabitha apparently did. While the Uhrwerkmänner take the street route, we navigate the bowels of MI37 and pick up Felicity along the way.

“Seriously?” she asks me. “On our doorstep?”

“They say they need our help.”

Apparently there is a facial expression for times like these that perfectly mixes skepticism and concern. Felicity provides me with a good opportunity to study it.

“This sort of shit happen to you often?” Hannah asks, hustling along behind us.

“No,” says Tabitha at the same time that Clyde says, “Probably more than it does to other professions.”

Felicity nods. “Both of those answers.”

“Right then.”

Another elevator ride takes us to the service entrance and a narrow alleyway. Tabitha studies her laptop along the way. “Nothing on security cameras or satellites. They’re alone.”

Kayla pulls back an old-fashioned steel grill as the elevator’s broad doors sweep open. The two Uhrwerkmänner stand in the alleyway, hunched and cloaked. I can smell something like engine oil and even standing still they emit a faint whirring sound.

Felicity steps forward. She extends a hand. “I’m Felicity Shaw, director of Military Intelligence Section Thirty-seven. I understand you are seeking aid from the British government.”

The one on the right shifts awkwardly, looks back at the alleyway’s entrance, but the other steps forward slightly. “I told your friend. We are in need of your help. Our lives, they are in danger.”

“From whom?” Felicity is brusquely efficient.

The robot hesitates. Then, “From time,” he says.

Felicity flicks a look in my direction. I try to micro-shrug, but that’s more Clyde’s game. She turns back to the robots.

“If I’m going to offer you any form of asylum,” Felicity says, “I’m going to need something decidedly less cryptic.”

The one nearer the alley exit shifts again. “They can offer us nothing,” he says. “This was mistake. I should not have listened to you.”

The friendlier of the two turns to him. Clacking German vowels and consonants are muttered in a rush back and forth, one placating, the other grumbling. The friendly Uhrwerkmänn turns back to us. “I am sorry,” he says. “This is difficult for us to discuss. We are so used to isolation. Of taking care of our own. This is difficult for Hermann. He feels Nils’ loss sharply.”

Another explosive burst of German from Mr Tall Bronze and Miserable. I see Kayla’s hand twitch toward her sword handle.

“Nils?” Felicity asks when the outburst is over.

The Uhrwerkmänner bobs his massive head, cloak quaking about him. “He attacked you yesterday. He caused much damage. He will not be the only one.”

Kayla’s hand twitches again. Felicity subtly shifts her stance, squares her weight between her feet.

“Is that a threat?”

The Uhrwerkmänn jerks his hands up, and Kayla’s sword is out of its sheath in the blink of an eye. My pistol and Hannah’s are hardly a second behind it. But the robot’s palms are again up, defensive. He takes a stumbling step back.

“No. No. Nothing like that. No. It is a tragedy. It is why we are here. We are breaking down. We need to be fixed.”

Felicity gives me another look. My gun is still out, but no longer trained on the big machine. The one called Hermann seems torn between fleeing for the street and charging us down. But the other one… He sounds genuine. There is an edge of bitterness and sorrow in his voice that I think it would be hard to fake. And honestly, if they wanted to attack us, that moment surely would have come by now.

I nod back to Felicity. For what my opinion is worth. She hesitates another second then nods in turn, this time to the Uhrwerkmänner. “You’d better come in.”

Prior to becoming a makeshift meeting room, the warehouse-sized storage room at the base of the service elevator shaft appears to have primarily provided a place for old tarpaulins to come and enjoy their twilight years in peace. Steel rafters criss-cross the ceiling, casting odd shadows against the thin fluorescent light.

Slowly the first Uhrwerkmänn removes his cloak, exposing himself foot by glistening foot. As the whole shape is revealed, I feel my heart stutter in my chest. This is yesterday repeating. Its form is too close, too similar. Adrenaline twitches at the corners of my senses. As large as it is, the warehouse suddenly feels too small, too confined. I want a blue sky above my head.

“Hello,” says the machine, “my name is Volk.”

I am still in possession of enough of my faculties to notice that there are differences between this Uhrwerkmänn and the one that almost ended me yesterday. The eyes are not insectile, but instead each one is described by a round panel of thick glass, like the bottom of a milk bottle. A panel of bronze approximates a nose. Instead of the constantly chattering teeth, its mouth is a thin horizontal speaker bar. There is less exposed gearwork, more panels. In general he seems to be in better physical shape, the metal polished, well-oiled. The clack and whir of his movements sounds smooth, not the awkward guttering clack of the other.

I try to focus on those differences, try to slow my breathing.

The other one, unfriendly Hermann, keeps his cloak on. He hangs back, deeper in the shadows, seemingly trying to gather an extra layer of obfuscation.

Volk looks to Clyde. “You named us, knew us. We are the Uhrwerkmänner.”

Clyde claps excitedly, unable to restrain himself. “You were right, Tabby,” he says, voice hitting a squeaky register. He fixes his full attention back on Volk. “Are you first generation? Were you really made by Joseph Lang?”

“He was the creator,” Volk says.

Clyde claps again. “Oh my God,” he says. “This is so exciting. We never get to work with actual functioning samples. It’s always descriptions in poorly constructed Greek. Abysmal Greek actually, for the most part. I mean, seriously, I know thaumaturgical research is time-consuming, but would it kill these people to take a month sabbatical and learn how to conjugate a dead language properly?” He shrugs violently. “Sorry, off topic. You need us to save all your lives. Probably more pressing.” He shrugs again. “How many of you are there?”

“Once we numbered twelve hundred,” Volk replies, his mechanical voice still steady, still sad.

Holy crap. Twelve hundred? Yesterday just one of them was hard enough to take down. My breathing starts to ratchet up again against my will.

An army of them marching. An army of arms raised. Descending.

I shake my head free of the image. Felicity shoots me a quizzical look, but I pretend I didn’t see it. I just let Clyde roll.

“Lang was a busy fellow, wasn’t he?” he says.

“He needed many of us,” Volk says by way of explanation.

Hermann leans forward, lays a massive bronze fist on Volk’s shoulder. “They need to know none of this. It does not help us.”

“Well,” Clyde leans forward, a slightly embarrassed look on his face, “we may need to actually. I mean, I don’t mean to be all contradictory—that statement may seem a little disingenuous after I just contradicted you, actually, but I hope you get the spirit of it at least. No need for this to be confrontational, is what I’m trying to say. Probably failing now. But I was aiming somewhere in the general direction of trying to suggest that the more information we have, generally the better it is for us, especially when we’re in the life-saving business. I mean there might be a considerable signal to noise ratio, but even the smallest detail might be important.”

Hermann grinds his gears at Clyde. There doesn’t seem to be another way to describe the noise he makes. He falls back into the shadows of his shapeless cloak once more.

“Look,” Hannah suddenly cuts into the awkward silence. “I mean, I’m new at this shit and all, but why are we interested in saving their lives here? I mean this is a giant Nazi robot who attacked you yesterday, right?”

Felicity and I go to speak at the same time, her probably more tactfully than me, but it’s Hermann who cuts us off.

“Do not mistake our creator’s broken philosophy for our own.” If he was disgruntled before, Hannah just managed to push him into full-on pissed off. Not a great start for her, which is pretty much exactly what I feared.