Twisted Metal (24 page)

Eleanor remained silent. Behind Kavan, a line of Storm Troopers stepped down from the train to the platform in perfect unison, their feet making a perfect double crash.

‘Get your troops, Eleanor,’ said Kavan, coming to a decision. ‘Send them out to the residential districts. There will be civilians cowering in their homes, wondering what they should do. Well, let’s keep them cowed. Get your troops to kill about a third of them.’

Eleanor gazed at him, shocked. ‘If you think so, Kavan.’

‘I do think so,’ said Kavan. He stared at her. ‘You want to be leader, Eleanor . . .’

‘No, I . . .’

‘Don’t deny it, Eleanor. You want to be leader. You know it. Very well, do you think you are really committed to Artemis?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then you will understand why I do as I do.’

Eleanor turned on her heel.

‘Oh, and Eleanor.’ She paused, looking back. Behind Kavan, the Storm Troopers stepped two paces forward in perfect formation. He continued. ‘Give them Nyro’s choice.’

Eleanor grimaced. ‘Of course, Kavan.’

Karel

Karel and Susan sat in silence in the cooling forge room, listening to the hum of Axel’s sleeping body. The child stirred, the yellow glow of his eyes deepened.

‘Go back to sleep, Axel,’ said Susan. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Why can’t we light the forge then, Mummy?’ said the child, sleepily. ‘I want to work on my legs.’

‘In the morning.’

Axel leaned against the wall and drifted back to sleep.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Susan.

Karel stopped by the door. ‘Back outside. I want to see what’s going on.’

‘Be careful.’

The hallway was dim. Karel turned his vision right up, crept down past the doors of his neighbours to the stair-well, now plunged into darkness. A faint noise of metal on metal echoed up from below. The sound of robots moving about. Karel felt a prickle of tension in his electromuscles. What was happening down there? Karel crept down the stairs, ears turned up full.

‘
Someone’s coming
. . .’

He heard the voice and froze. A light snapped on, framing him in its beam.

‘
Who’s that? Karel?
What are you doing creeping up on us?’ The voice was unfriendly, suspicious.

‘Garfel, is that you?’ Karel strained to see past the bright glare of the light.

‘Stay where you are!’

Karel had been on edge all night, wondering what was happening outside in the city, fearful for his family, rejected by his fellow citizens. Their command was enough to ignite the anger that was woven deep into his mind.

‘
Rust
, NO!’ he swore. He stamped forward, roughly pushing aside the lamp and the robot who had shone it at him.

‘Hey, be careful!’ Karel recognized Gustav’s voice. And now Karel’s eyes adjusted to the dimness of the communal area that lay beyond the stairs. A wide, tall space, the furniture pushed to one side to make more space for the robots that had assembled in the darkness. And Karel felt his anger increase. So many robots, men, women, children: all Turing Citizens and all dressed in underwater bodies. Grey whale metal, elongated faces and big glassy eyes, all illuminated by a dim green glow.

‘Traitors!’ said Karel. ‘Traitors, all of you!’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Robots looked to the floor, to the ceiling, everywhere but at him.

A voice spoke up. ‘Who are you calling traitors, Karel? Who is it that allowed these Artemisians into our city?’

‘What?’ Karel felt a burning inside him like the flame of a forge. ‘What are you talking about? No one let the Artemisians in. Didn’t you notice, Ruther? They attacked! They destroyed the station!’

‘Oh yes, we have been attacked. But before that, Karel. Who was it that diluted Turing City by allowing in immigrants? Who was it that diluted the resolve of the people by allowing refugees from Wien and Bethe and Born, even from Artemis itself, into this state?’

Karel was furious. Even so, he controlled his temper. Just.

‘I don’t see any refugees amongst this crowd,’ he said. ‘I only see Turing Citizens. I wonder where the refugees are at the moment. I wonder if they might be out there in the city, fighting for it?’

There was another uncomfortable silence at this point. Karel pressed home his advantage.

‘And think of this, you robots who are about to run away, who are about to become refugees yourselves. What are you going to do when you are walking on the seabed if you meet another state already down there? Will you expect them to welcome you with open arms?’

No one spoke. The robots focused on the floor, on the ceiling, on anything but each other.

And then Garfel came forward. Garfel who lived in the apartment above Karel and who ran the residents’ committee. Garfel who was too friendly with Susan, Garfel who had an opinion on everything.

‘Why are we even taking the time to listen to you Karel, here at the fall of Turing City?’ he asked. ‘Even twenty years ago there were citizens who would have turned your mother back out onto the Zernike plain when she carried you here as a child. And maybe they would have been right to do so, because even twenty years ago, when all was at peace, there was something about you that some never did trust. Well, that was then, and this is now. Just be happy Karel that
your
side has won. I say you should think yourself lucky we don’t take things further. As it is, I say leave us alone and go home. Go back up to your apartment and wait for your friends to arrive.’

There was more uneasy stirring in the crowd. Karel’s fury burned like a jet of white flame now, a flame intense enough to melt metal. But still he held himself in check.

‘I am as much a citizen of this place as you are, Garfel. More so, because I am staying here and not running.’

Garfel laughed. ‘Or are you staying here because you, at least, have nothing to fear?’

He turned to the assembled robots.

‘Come on, it’s time to move out. We need to reach the sea before dawn.’

Garfel’s words brought a momentary stillness to the robots in the hall. Karel understood why. For all of them, this was it. This was the moment when their flight became real. For these robots, Turing City was no more.

‘You could stay,’ suggested Karel.

‘No,
you
can stay,’ said Garfel. ‘But you can also be merciful. Send down Susan, we’ll take care of her.’

And the white flame was there again, threatening to melt Karel from the inside.

‘What about Axel?’ he asked.

‘
He
can stay. He’s half Artemisian after all.’

Something clicked in Karel’s mind. He lashed out, buckling and badly hurting his hand on the whale metal of Garfel’s chest. He didn’t care, he didn’t feel it. He was a storm of metal, kicking and gouging and scratching and stabbing, but he could find no purchase on Garfel’s new body. Still he didn’t care. Still he fought.

But Garfel was too strong. He’d always had so much lifeforce and now he was clad in heavy whale metal. Slowly, he pushed Karel to the floor, stepping onto Karel’s left arm, bending it out of true, wrenching the electromuscle with his hand so that it fed back, making Karel let out an electronic scream.

Garfel released him, and Karel struggled to get up again, to attack Garfel, but another robot kicked his arm away, and he rolled across the floor, anger and pain flooding through his mind. He tried to rise again and was tripped once more. And then they were all over him, stamping on his chest, denting the panelling. They wrenched at his arm so that the metal bent and the electromuscle twisted painfully over the tear in his own panelling. A heavy whalemetal foot stamped down on his hand, crushing three of his fingers.

Anger gave way to pain, pain was swamped by despair. Through the legs of his attackers he could see the sea-grey bodies of his former fellow citizens gradually draining from the hall. None of them looked back in his direction.

Eventually the beating ended. Finally they let him alone.

‘Traitor . . .’ said Karel from the ground, his voice an electronic whine. Garfel stood over him, gazing down with his pale grey eyes.

‘How long,’ whined Karel, ‘how long were you planning this?’

Garfel said nothing; he just continued to stare down at Karel, who lay listening to the heavy tread of robots filing from the room.

Olam

Olam made his way along the street, eagerly scanning the windows and doorways for further prey.

‘You’ve never been to Turing City before, boy?’

Doe Capaldi was there at his side. It seemed as if Doe Capaldi was always there at his side, checking up on him.

‘Never,’ said Olam. ‘I’ve read about it, of course. It’s a lot smaller than I expected.’

‘You’re not seeing the real city here. We’re heading into the residential area, not the centre. We’re coming in from the east, stopping anyone escaping out this way.’

‘I know what we’re doing,’ snapped Olam. ‘You’ve been to Turing City before, I suppose?’

‘Naturally,’ replied Doe Capaldi, swinging around for a moment to check a sign of movement down a side street. An Artemisian infantryrobot emerged from a doorway down there and gave them an okay sign.

‘Yes,’ continued Doe Capaldi, ‘I came here several times as part of the ambassador’s retinue. On one occasion I was presented with a breastplate of electrum. It was a fine piece of work.’ He was silent for a moment, lost in memory. ‘The paint shops in the galleries are particularly fine, too. A pity we were not sent to ransack those instead, boy!’

‘Don’t call me boy,’ said Olam. ‘We’re equal now, both soldiers of Artemis.’

‘I’m still your sergeant,’ Doe Capaldi reminded him.

‘You hate me, don’t you?’ said Olam. ‘I tried to have you killed.’

‘I understand why you did it,’ replied Doe Capaldi smoothly. ‘It’s all down to the way you were made. I would expect nothing else from one of your class.’

Just one day ago the insult would have goaded Olam. But not now. Olam had killed and he felt different now. He wasn’t a commoner any more.

He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t speak to me like that, Doe Capaldi. I’m watching you, you know. You should watch me. One dark night in the middle of battle . . .’

‘You’re making too much of the past, boy. We’re all Artemisians now.’

Olam laughed nastily. ‘Yes, and I bet that hurts you a lot more than it hurts me. You’ve lost far more than I have, Doe Capaldi.’

But Doe Capaldi wasn’t even listening. He gave a signal, and his patrol moved to either side of the street, lost themselves in its doorways and shadows.

Something was coming.

Olam waited in the shadow cast by an ornamental metal pillar that climbed the side of one building.

There was movement further up the street, and for a moment Olam was plunged back into the stories of his childhood, of ghosts that rose up and stalked the world at night. Ghosts, the empty metal shells of bodies from which the mind had been taken, or which had merely died. Ghosts! Bodies that did not need minds to make them move, they hunted the world at night, searching for wire that they could draw from a sleeping child’s head, winding it out inch by inch. As the child slumbered, their dreams were turned to darkness as their life was spooled away, to be bottled up and reawoken in the perverted nightmare of a ghost’s shell.

Olam almost let out a whine of fear, but then he realized that these were not ghosts but the living citizens of Turing City. He could see the light in their eyes, dim and green and almost dissolved by the light of Zuse.

Why do they look so odd?
he wondered. Their bodies were grey and misshapen, they marched two abreast in silence through the streets, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.

‘Where are they going?’ The words were spoken so softly that Olam momentarily imagined they floated from the hollow lands, borne to him on the cold breeze as if the ghosts of the north were speaking to him. But no, it was only Doe Capaldi, leaning close to him in the shadow.

‘I don’t know . . .’

The misshapen robots marched silently past, their strangely wide feet planting themselves solidly on the smooth concrete of the road, pressing firmly down into shadow. Adults, children, young and old, all making their way through the night, two by two. And now the tail end of the procession had passed. Doe Capaldi gave the signal, and his squad began to move through the shadows of the moonlit city, silently following the grey ghosts.

Susan

‘Karel!’ gasped Susan. ‘What’s happened to you?’

Karel dragged his way into the room. She took in his injuries with a terrified stare. He couldn’t move one leg properly, a hand was badly mangled.

‘Speak to me, Karel!’

His voice was nothing more than an electronic whine.

‘Oh Karel! Was it Artemis? Are they downstairs?’

‘No . . .’

The forge had gone cold now. Still, there was tin, there was a little gold. She could do something with those. She felt the electronic pulse throbbing from his leg, turned him over and saw the way the electromuscle there was caught on the external metal.