Empire State (32 page)

  The Science Pirate's helmet turned to Kane. Kane wondered who was behind the sculpted mask.

  "And how do we do that?" his companion asked.

  "Collapse the Fissure. The Empire State folds up and takes everyone through to New York."

  "And how do we do
that
?"

  Kane laughed.

  "What?"

  "Oh, that's the easy part," said Kane. "I thought you were the scientist?"

  The Science Pirate turned away, but didn't say anything. Kane wondered if his companion was thinking or offended. He was about to continue when the Science Pirate spoke again. Thinking, then.

  "Energy input?"

  Kane wagged his gloved finger. "Got it in one."

  The Pirate said, "There's nothing in your tiny little world to provide it though."

  "Right again, but we've got something that's not from this world, exactly."

  "Explain?"

  Kane pumped his rocket boots, lifting higher a little. He looked down at the Science Pirate, then beckoned with a hand.

  "Come with me. We've got exactly what we need, waiting above the clouds."

  Kane throttled his rockets and shot skyward, his blue and white jets fanning out over the Science Pirate as he vanished through the cloud deck.

  The Science Pirate watched him rise, then raised one arm straight up and followed.

 
 

 

 
 

THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, the seat of the city commissioners, was a fortress. At one hundred and two stories, over fourteen hundred feet high, it was the tallest building on the island, and sat at the heart of the city, a shining beacon that the citizenry were justly proud of. Scared of as well, for it was an inescapable reminder of the tight control the City Commissioners had over them. Keep yourself to yourself, do as you were told, and they'd leave you alone. Step out of line, and it was you versus the Empire State. And you weren't going to win.

  One hundred and two stories of reinforced, armour-clad stone and steel. Each level as secure as a prison, each of the hundred or more departments contained within protected not just by thick walls but by a whole platoon of heavily armed Empire State police. The Empire State Building was an impregnable citadel and a symbol. So long as the Empire State Building stood, the Empire State would prevail.

  At 4.05am, all contact was lost with the last police covering floors one through fifty. The building commander in the operations deck on the one hundredth floor ordered security sections from floors fifty-one through seventy-five to take positions on the fifty-second floor, with the remaining police to dig in at ninety-nine. Above the operations deck was the commissioners' boardroom, and above that the Chairman's private quarters. The Chairman needed to be protected at all costs. Nothing could get past floor one hundred.

  The attack, it seemed, had come from street level. The entire ground floor had gone black, but by the time the staff in the operations deck had worked out it wasn't a power cut or glitch in the system, word came from the second and then the third floor. Something was coming. More confusion, more hesitation followed. Security coverage of the building stretched several blocks in every direction, and nothing had been seen aside from the usual smattering of authorised early morning traffic. It was only when the emergency channel from the fourth floor finally sprang into life – relaying the screams of the dying to the Building Commander – that he fully realised the trouble they were in. The Empire State was under direct attack. For the first time the Enemy had struck home.

  By the time the building commander gave out what were to be his final orders, it was too late. Floors fell, one by one. Operators lost radio contact with section leaders while the building commander demanded to know why they hadn't seen the strike force coming. The police blimps on routine patrol all over the city were called, but they only confirmed what the building surveillance teams had already said. There was no strike force, no army. Not even a crack team of commandos or saboteurs. The blimps had seen nothing. The city was quiet.

  The navy was called at the waterside bunker. Peering out into the fog over the water, they kept a constant watch. Nothing. The perimeter was secure, and the ironclad in the harbour was under guard, so what the hell was going on in the Empire State Building?

  To his credit, if the building commander had known what he was dealing with, he might have been able to formulate a plan of defence. But there was no way he could ever have predicted in just what form the attack would come, and perhaps he didn't even believe what he was seeing with his own eyes when death came to take him while he was still sitting in his command chair. After the crew of the operations deck were massacred, the combined sections on the ninety-ninth floor held out for nearly ten minutes, but when they fell, there was nothing between the invaders and the commissioners.

  Two blimps launched from the roof, carrying the four deputy commissioners skyward. The craft drifted upwards, negotiating the ring of a dozen police ships that now orbited the building, called in by the emergency signals broadcast from the operations deck. As the blimps powered away into the clouds, the emergency signal went dead, and in the first blimp Deputy Commissioner Warren watched as the building's lights went out, turning the elegant, tapering tower into a featureless black shadow, a void in the heart of the Empire State. Warren's mind raced. They needed to regroup, quickly, and gather their forces. Perhaps the fleet could be called back, but they'd never been able to re-establish contact with it after it entered the fog. And who would be the Chairman now? The great and noble leader of the Empire State had ordered their evacuation, and armed only with a revolver, had decreed that he would hold the boardroom, the symbol of the city governance, by his own hand for as long as possible. He'd said it was his moral duty.

 

On the one hundred-and-first floor, the Chairman stood by the vast, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall plate glass window, watching the twin blimps sail upwards and vanish into the orangey clouds. Other shapes, other blinking lights swam around in the night sky, several of the police blimps breaking off from the cordon formed around the Empire State Building to escort the deputy commissioners safely away.

  The boardroom was cavernous and austere, its marble floor and columns designed to convey an atmosphere of solemn importance. The meeting table itself, a single slab of black marble, could have seated two dozen with room to spare, but looked tiny and isolated in the centre of the enormous room.

  Although the building's power had gone, the boardroom was suffused by the light of the city from the glass wall. But standing in the shadow of a marble column, the Chairman was practically invisible to anyone entering the room. When he heard the double doors of the chamber swish open and solid, echoing footsteps approach, he allowed himself a smile. The revolver hung loosely in his left hand, the hammer gently rocking back and forth, back and forth, under his thumb.

  "Welcome to the Empire State," he said, taking a step backwards from the window and turning on his heel to face the new arrival. He carefully placed the revolver on the tabletop with a
clack
, hammer safe, and sat down. Relaxed, he steepled his hands in front of his face.

  "Report, please. What did you find?"

  The intruder had stopped in the shadow of a pillar, but at the Chairman's invitation walked into the light, each hammeron-anvil footstep accompanied by a whirring of gears and the ticking of a clock.

  The Chairman watched as the robot walked towards him, taking smooth, oiled steps in a horrible parody of human movement. Its monotonous voice ground from somewhere within its metal chest.

  "Orders, sir."

  The Chairman tapped the table and stood, rubbing the tip of his nose as he walked back to the window. Behind him there was a click, and then another, and then the robot spoke again.

  "Orders, sir."

  But the Chairman wasn't listening. He looked down on the city, lost in thought.

 

Seconds, minutes, or hours passed. The Chairman didn't know. The clock inside the robot ticked time away. It was... hypnotic. Comforting. The Chairman shook his head and sighed, and glanced at the machine.

  The robot had joined him at the window. When, the Chairman couldn't remember. If he didn't know better, he could have sworn that the thing was actually
looking
down at the city. Could it remember? Could any of them? Was there anything left inside the copper and pressed steel shell that could
think
independently, remember what had happened to it, how it had happened. Remember its past life? The machine was motionless, and silent except for the clock, tick-tock.

  The Chairman coughed, surprised at his own nervousness. It wasn't fear, not really, it was anxiety, that low grade of growing panic familiar to everyone at some point in their lives. Times of danger. The need for self-preservation. Fight or flight.

  The robot was taller than he was and it didn't move when the Chairman stepped closer. He wanted to touch it, to feel whether its machined surface, tarnished now after its fight up from the street, was hot or cold. Would the robot even feel it? He raised a hand, but before his fingertips even made contact, the Chairman jerked his arm back as if shocked. There was whirring again from the robot, but still it didn't move, although maybe its head had shifted slightly, imperceptibly. The Chairman couldn't really tell.

  The robot's clock continued to tick. Time. Not enough of it, and how much had been lost in a daydream the Chairman didn't know. People would be coming soon. Once they'd judged it safe enough to enter the building, lots of people with guns and armour of their own would come to rescue the Empire State's highest official. Time pressed on the Chairman's mind like a dead weight.

  Guilt, as well. There was no one left in the building, he knew that. The robot had killed them all. It had to, in order to reach him. Nobody could know of the plan, so there was no alternative. The Chairman regretted it and the regret blossomed into guilt, but he knew there was more to come, much, much more, and he knew he would regret that too. Untold destruction. Apocalypse. Holocaust. But it was worth it. It was all part of the plan. The ends justified the means.

  Only... only standing and staring out of the window, if that's what the robot
was
doing, watching the city below was
not
part of the programming. What if it had gone wrong? What if the plan, after all these years, was going to fail? What if the very purpose of the City Commissioners, the Chairman, the Empire State itself, was to come to nothing?

  No, no. Panic, anxiety, guilt was driving the Chairman's thoughts, and he knew it. Everything had been planned. Everything was in order. This was it, the final moment.

  The Chairman of the City Commissioners took a deep breath, calming himself. He rolled his shoulders and shook his arms and walked around the robot until he was behind it. He turned away from it, and very gently leaned against its back. The robot was warm, hot even. He pushed against it, straightening both legs against the floor and pushing as hard as he could against the machine. But the robot didn't move, didn't even rock on its feet. It was like leaning against a stone pillar. The Chairman felt safe, at least, having the robot with him. Perhaps, if the police came too soon, before they were done, the robot would protect him.

  "Orders, sir," the robot intoned. Its voice was human, male, but it sounded far away, and was lightly dusted in static. The Chairman closed his eyes, wondering if the man inside the shell knew what had happened to him after he volunteered for the fleet.

  "Report," the Chairman whispered.

 

 
 

 
 

THE AIR WAS WARM, AND CLOSE, and there was a creeping dampness underneath Rad. The back of his head hurt like all hell, and when he moved to feel the damage, sensation suddenly returned to his whole body like he'd put his finger in a wall socket. The ground was hard, grooved somehow. His hand found wet wood underneath him, past the bump at the back of his head.

  Rad opened his eyes, and saw an orange-tinged sky, dark with lighter patches drifting on the wind. His view was obscured by something black and moving. He sat up.

  He was lying on a park bench in a small park, laid with grass, ringed with hedges, with a tall, spreading tree in the centre, its leafed branches swaying in the slight breeze. The sound was, Rad imagined, that kind of peaceful, almost melancholic rustling, a tiny sliver of natural, organic sound in the heart of the industrial city. Except he couldn't hear it over the buzzing in his head. He blinked, and moved his eyes. It felt like someone was trying to scoop them out with hot spoons.

  He closed his eyes, screwing them tight and drawing balled fists against them by primal instinct. Rad moaned, and curled his legs up to his chest. One roll to the right and he collided with the ground in front of the bench.

  Something snagged on the narrow edge of one of the wooden planks of the bench. It pulled Rad's left arm up awkwardly, and as his conscious mind fought against the wreath of pain that had suddenly enveloped it like boiling water around a coddled egg, his subconscious worked on getting his hand free. After a few minutes of waggling the appendage, without success, Rad finally realised what it was. One of the looped straps of his mask was caught over the edge of the bench. Rad stared at the mask as it strained on the end of the strap, using it as a focal point. He pulled himself to his knees, eyes narrowed on the glass goggles glinting in the orange night air, and sucked in wet air across clenched teeth, lips pulled back in a dog-like scowl. His head buzzed and his chest hurt and his teeth throbbed as the air was drawn over them.