by Dave Rudden
This was her dad before she had lost her mam.
‘See?’ Amélie said delightedly. ‘Huge improvement. Slabs are extremely programmable, especially when there’s a live subject to copy.’
‘That’s … that’s what you’re going to do to me,’ Catherine said. ‘Copy me with your … your Slab.’
Amélie had that little knife-point grin again, shiny and sharp. ‘Well … yes and no. I’m going to be you, Catherine. A much better you than you are, by the looks of it. A properly perfect little girl. And the process is far more enjoyable than messing around with Slabs.’
‘It is?’ the real Maurice asked haltingly.
‘Oh yes,’ Amélie said with relish. ‘We Plasmavores have an expression.’ She twirled the straw round her fingers. ‘You are what you eat.’
The two Maurices stared at each other. Catherine couldn’t blame her dad for being so stricken. It was like looking into a mean-spirited funhouse mirror – a reflection not distorted but improved. A better version of yourself than you could ever be.
She wondered what Amélie would look like, when Amélie was her.
‘Of course,’ Amélie continued, ‘there’s one little problem.’
‘Problem?’ Maurice whispered faintly, and Catherine noticed with a chill that the Slab-Maurice moved his lips almost in time with the real one.
‘Yes,’ Amélie said patiently. ‘A problem. I’ll be needing a picture of Catherine’s mother. For Madeleine to copy.’ She was suddenly on her feet, skittering closer on her little white shoes to tap Maurice on the knee with the straw. ‘Quickly now.’
Catherine spat at her. It was half defiance, and half a ludicrous hope that any leftover salt-and-vinegar in her spit might somehow burn Amélie. Unfortunately, the Plasmavore simply dodged out of the way, quick as a snake, and snapped the metal straw she was holding across Catherine’s face in a thin, stinging line.
‘Nice try,’ the monster hissed. ‘I do respect anger a lot more than grief. And nicely observed on the salt. As dear Henri said, I have to be very careful about the amount I take in. That’s why humans are so delicious. Your blood gets the balance juuust right.’
She turned back to Maurice. ‘Come on then, weeper. Where are the photos?’
Maurice was staring at Catherine, his eyes red from crying. The sight made Catherine irrationally angry. He was her dad. He was supposed to be looking after her, and yet she was the one doing all the fighting. It was typical.
‘Cupboard above the sink,’ Maurice said. Catherine’s eyes narrowed, and he gave her a minute shake of his head. ‘The box at the very top.’
Amélie’s laugh was a high little tinkle. ‘Wonderful.’
‘Don’t you touch them,’ Maurice snapped, but his heart wasn’t in it, and Amélie just snickered again. ‘Get one of your … one of your creatures to do it. I don’t want you touching them.’
‘No?’ Amélie purred. She took a dancing little step towards the kitchen, a kitten playing with its food. ‘Stand down, Slabs. I’ll fetch them myself.’
‘Be careful,’ Maurice whispered. ‘It’s all a bit precarious up there.’
Amélie cackled. ‘Are you really giving me advice right now? Grow a spine, human.’
She disappeared round the corner, and Catherine heard the squeak of little shoes on plastic as the Plasmavore scrambled up on the counter, then the creak of the cupboard door.
‘Top shelf,’ Maurice said, his eyes on Catherine. ‘The box at the back.’
There was a rustle, and Amélie Plasmavore pulled on the box so hard that it and several Tupperware bowls of salt came down on her head.
Catherine didn’t see what happened next, but she heard it, and that was enough. Every pane of glass in the house shattered as the shriek of a dying Plasmavore bored through Catherine’s brain. It was so loud and went on for so long that she was almost convinced she’d be hearing it forever, and then it dried up, like a slug under salt.
Henri and Madeleine looked extremely confused for a moment, then fell flat on their faces.
‘I didn’t realise you knew I kept them there,’ Catherine said eventually, through the ringing in her ears.
Maurice shrugged as much as his bonds would allow. ‘It’s not a big house, Catherine.’
More silence. Catherine bit her lip.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maurice said, and this time it was quieter and softer and smaller than all the apologies before, but somehow bigger too. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to do so much. I’m sorry I haven’t been a dad to you for a while. It’s my job to keep you safe.’
‘It’s our job,’ Catherine said. ‘Mam is gone, but we’re still here. We have to keep each other safe.’
Maurice smiled sadly.
Then the door banged open so loudly Maurice fell off his chair.
Standing in the doorway was another stranger. He didn’t have the sheer mass of the Slabs or the plastic prettiness of Amélie Plasmavore, but there was something in his wide, wild eyes and frantically orbiting hands that made Catherine think alien as well.
It seemed to be the night for them.
‘Salt,’ he said dramatically, ‘can overload a Plasmavore’s circulatory system.’
He paused, taking in the scene in front of him.
‘The Slabs are down,’ he said, and Catherine could swear there was disappointment in his voice. ‘Did I do that? I don’t think I did that.’
‘No,’ Catherine said. ‘We did. Now, are you any good at knots?’
8
A Girl Called Doubt
When the Cybermen came to Agrippina, everything changed.
Change was the one constant, amid the chaos of the invasion. There had been so many news broadcasts, so many panicked voices – government statements, arguing reporters, experts and anti-experts referring to the Eleventh Cyber Legion as an army, as a plague, as demons, as the end of days. The only thing these competing opinions actually did agree on is what the Cybermen were there to do.
Conversion.
The Cybermen had converted Agrippina in a whole host of ways. It had been a planet of blue skies scrubbed clean of cloud by strong winter winds. Its cities had been long avenues lined by crocuses and neat plazas of marble so white it was hard to tell where the stone ended and the snow began. Agrippina Primus, the capital, had been a city of churches – not just the towering Cathedral Majoris at the city’s heart, but dozens of little chapels and shrines and places of worship, each as unique as a loved one’s smile.
Now, most of Agrippina Primus’s avenues are rubble. The perfect lines of the plazas are cratered by bombardment, and the sky and the snow are grey with ash. From the top floor of the abandoned warehouse in which they’ve made camp, Doubt can see that many of the churches still stand but, instead of reaching proudly for the sky, their steeples now list to one side like a company of punch-drunk knights.
‘All the crocuses are dead,’ she whispers. It is the first time she has spoken aloud in days.
‘Get away from the window,’ Sergeant Terrick growls from beside the fire. He is the largest human being Doubt has ever met, and the quietest – a huge brute of a man whose eyes stare out, bleak and bright, from a face permanently darkened by camouflage paint and soot.
‘We have to keep in cover, Doubt,’ Memnes says. His voice is kinder. This is how it always works with the sergeant and the scientist: Terrick growls; Memnes smooths.
‘The further we get into the city,’ Memnes adds, ‘the likelier it is we’ll run into any steelers the legion left behind.’
Steelers. It’s as good a name as any for the Cybermen. It describes what they are, and what they do.
Doubt pulls back from the blown-out window but does not apologise for her carelessness. She’s only been part of the resistance for a short while, but she’s already noticed that the extra second it takes to say sorry is a second you could be using to fall back in line. You don’t apologise. You correct your mistake.
The other members of the squad have set up a chem-fire in th
e centre of the room, with boxes stacked around it so that the light doesn’t escape. All the boxes are still in shrink-wrap. A vending machine in the corner is somehow still running. There are mugs in the sink. If you were to ignore the broken windowpanes – shattered like all the others in Agrippina Primus – then these soldiers would be the only sign that the war had happened at all.
‘Feels strange, this fire,’ Raoul says, rubbing their gloved fingers. It isn’t really a fire at all, of course, but a crunch-pack of chemicals that, when mixed together, produce a warm purple glow. ‘Not quite heat, but the feel of heat, you know? The dream of it.’
‘Better than nothing,’ says Badoris. Her pulse rifle sits disassembled in front of her, and she is trying to scrape some charry build-up from the barrel. Badoris does this at every opportunity. Doubt isn’t very experienced with pulse rifles, and has no idea whether the residue affects the gun’s performance or whether the slender, fussy woman just doesn’t like knowing that it’s there. ‘And at least they’re reliable.’
Memnes doesn’t rise to the insult. He was some sort of scientist before the war. He doesn’t talk about it much. But, whatever he was before, he is resistance now. There’s a raw recruit in every patrol, to get them trained and ready to fight. Baptism of fire – they will learn or they will die.
In a way, the Cybermen are converting them too.
‘Save your breath,’ Terrick says. ‘You’ll need it if we’re going to win the war.’ There’s a touch of irony in his voice. Winning the war has become a little joke among the soldiery, simply because it can’t be done.
The Eleventh Cyber Legion converted Agrippina into a place near-unliveable, reduced it to ruin, and left it riddled with thousands of steelers they didn’t think – or didn’t want – to take with them. And, when the bulk of the legion moved on from this planet, they took the war with them to a new one. Doubt doesn’t know where those Cybermen have gone, or whether other resistance movements are having more luck. Most likely they’re all dead, or near enough.
Conversion, Doubt knows, is just another word for killing.
Winning the war means something else to patrols like this. The day you find a food cache. The day you find ammo for your pulse rifle, or a miraculously undamaged charging station. The moment you find a survivor who somehow made it through the invasion. Cans of preserved fruit and battered sleeping bags wouldn’t have been cause for a parade in peacetime, but now they are what victory looks like in the city of Agrippina Primus.
The soldiers start putting out the fire, rearranging the boxes so it looks like nobody was ever there. Doubt helps, ignoring the sour look Terrick gives her. There’s no use trying to figure out why the sergeant doesn’t like her. The available evidence suggests he doesn’t like anyone at all.
As she moves to leave, something silver winks at the corner of her sight. When she turns, there is nothing there.
The patrol moves through dead Agrippina Primus, up along the old docks, the piers now sitting high and exposed after fat Cyber-Collector ships drained the harbour dry. They scramble over defences – first the expertly laid ramparts of steel reinforced by energy-shield generators, and then the hasty barricades that were thrown up after the ramparts failed.
Badoris leads from the front, taking the squad from cover to cover as methodically as a child joining the dots. Doubt follows, then Memnes, still awkwardly holding the rifle Doubt has never seen him fire, then finally Raoul, playing the scope of their sniper rifle smoothly over broken windows and storefronts.
Terrick is … somewhere. He never stays too long with the squad, instead looping out in constant circles like a moth circling a flame, directing Badoris from defensible point to defensible point. Doubt will be watching some flutter of movement – cloth in a breeze, the scampering of a rat – and then suddenly the sergeant will be there, glaring and motioning with a jerk of his fingers to keep her eyes on the path ahead.
It’s hard. Harder than he makes it look. Doubt has lived here her entire life, and every time they turn a corner she sees some new scar created by the Cybermen. She’s been to Julius Café. It’s supposed to have bright-red awnings outside and a host of stray cats out the back because Master Julius never closes his bins. The Domitian shopping district is supposed to be a tinsel-laced throng of people at this time of year, a wall of noise that always used to make Mother grab Doubt’s hand extra-tight before they plunged in, like divers meeting a wave. These places shouldn’t be empty. They shouldn’t be rubble.
Doubt keeps expecting one thing – remembering one thing – and seeing another. She doesn’t like it. It’s as if the city is arguing with her.
Again, a silver flash out of the corner of her eye. She turns, but there is nothing. Nothing except the snow and the ash and the rubble like exposed bones, and the squad is moving too fast for her to be able to look properly.
It’s nothing, she thinks. Silver is everywhere these days.
That’s the worst thing about conversion. Doubt lost people in the war. They all did. She understands loss. The gap it leaves, that can be impossible to fill. It isn’t that the Cyber-Leader and his legion killed Agrippina. It’s that they killed it, and it’s still here.
An hour later, they see their first Cyberman.
The steeler is standing in the shadow of a burned-out post office, facing the front door as if it has just knocked and is waiting for a response. The street for thirty metres around is covered in the charred remains of envelopes. Ash drifts on the breeze.
Doubt wouldn’t have noticed the steeler at all if Terrick hadn’t abruptly stepped out of the shadow of a truck to halt them, his rifle already trained on the lone silver figure. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. Memnes and Badoris immediately turn to form the nine and three points of a clock – Memnes a little clumsy – while Raoul spins to cover their six with their steeler-killer sniper rifle.
Since Doubt is the newest to the squad she simply crouches, her pulse rifle up and panning. The thought of firing it makes her ill.
Cybermen aren’t people, she tells herself. Not any more.
There is a huge government-issue poster on the side of the post office, and it shows a plucky Agrippinan youth in a peaked cap, dead Cybermen piled at her feet. The slogan reads UPGRA-DEAD: THEY’RE NOT WHO YOU KNEW. There were hundreds of these posters back at the start of the war – back when everyone thought the war could be won, and the news was still full of people asking for some sort of cure for conversion. ‘What will we do with all the people the Cybermen have converted?’ they asked. ‘How will we change them back?’
Doubt heard scientists tried cures. Tried their own forms of conversion. By all accounts, it did not go well.
Nobody asks those questions any more. Now, there are just the posters, damp and faded beneath the ash, and the nickname that the soldiers have given the trudging metal monsters. Steelers. The undead come to steal you away.
And this steeler looks dead. It looks like it has been dead a while. It looks like it died in the war, back when the resistance had access to weapons more complicated than pulse rifles or pistols. Something high-powered and non-standard – a spatial cutter or positron cannon – has caught the steeler on its left side, scooping away a third of its body in a neat semicircle beginning at its lower hip and ending just below its chin. Like an ice-cream scoop, slicing one whole side of the steeler away. Snow has collected in the wound.
The steeler’s one remaining hand is still moving. That’s what caught Terrick’s attention. It is gently tapping at the post-office door.
Threat minimal, Terrick signs with a flick of his fingers. Sign language is one of the first things you learn for these patrols, though Doubt finds it hard to get her fingers to make the shapes.
Hold fire, the sergeant adds, and then there’s a knife in his hand, its edge glittering blue with an unstable molecule field. A veteran’s weapon, designed for killing steelers. Terrick, Doubt knows, has been killing steelers for a very long time.
The hu
ge man vanishes into the shadows, reappearing just a few seconds later at the far end of the street, just six metres from the ruined Cyberman. It does not notice, still sleepily tap-tap-tapping on the door.
Do we have to kill it?
The thought comes out of nowhere, and Doubt is immediately angry at herself for having it. Of course they have to. It’s a steeler. It’s a monster. It died when the Cybermen converted it, and all Terrick is doing is finishing the job. There are thousands of steelers like this on Agrippina, all left behind because Cyber-Leaders weigh every choice they make against the energy required. If it takes too much effort to repair a single Cyberman, the legion simply leaves it behind. That’s why Agrippina will never be unconverted. The Cyber Legion didn’t want to waste the resources to fix these steelers, but the resistance does not have the bodies to destroy them all.
The Cyberman tapping at the post-office door was a person once. They had a life. They had friends. They had family. But the monsters that stole them and took them apart don’t even want them any more.
What a waste, Doubt thinks. What a terrible, stupid waste.
The sergeant is only a metre or so away now, a shadow inside a shadow, his knife behind his back so as not to catch the light. A sudden flurry of wind peels some snow from the windowsill by the Cyberman, and then there is that flash of silver again – just a tiny line glinting in the cold winter sun.
Did you used to work here? Doubt wonders, her eyes on the steeler’s reflection in the dark glasswork of the door. Did you come back because something in you thought the war was done?
She pities the monster, then. The war will never be over. Oh, it might be won, some day, out in the stars, but the war will always be here on Agrippina, because the abandoned Cybermen will always be here.
Then Terrick’s blade darts out –
A sound suddenly shakes the air, a low drone as menacing as a wasp, and deafeningly loud –
And the steeler catches Terrick’s knife in the vice of its hand.
‘Contact!’ Badoris snaps. No sign language this time. That’s how Doubt knows they’re in trouble. ‘Aerial contact!’