by Dave Rudden
Memnes fumbles off his safety. Raoul racks a round into their rifle with a dry clack, turning with Badoris to follow the moaning purr as it circles above them, invisible behind the press of buildings.
It sounds like breathing. It sounds like the low and dangerous growl of a predator just out of sight.
Terrick doesn’t bother wrestling with the creature for control of his knife. Instead, he lets it go, and drives his huge knee right into the Cyberman’s damaged side.
Nothing. Not a tremor. Not a flinch. Instead, the steeler crushes the knife between its fingers and clubs Terrick on the side of the head. Suddenly Terrick is on his knees, the most confused Doubt has ever seen him, his mouth and eyes comically wide.
Doubt doesn’t even think. She drops her shoulder and charges. The steeler has just enough time to turn before she puts it through the stone wall. It’s the last straw for the post office. The whole structure, already sagging like it’s been punched in the stomach, collapses in on the Cyberman with a roar. Dust billows over Doubt, and, through it, she realises that the sound of the unseen predator has vanished.
Doubt holds her hand out to Terrick, but the sergeant doesn’t take it. Instead, he pushes himself to his feet with a groan. A bruise is already darkening the side of his neck. He was lucky the Cyberman was damaged. A punch from a steeler can break a person’s neck.
For a moment Doubt has the distinct feeling that she’s forgotten something, but for the life of her she doesn’t know what.
‘Sergeant …’ Memnes points at the ground. Silver insects glint on the snow, scrabbling on their backs from where the building’s collapse has dislodged them. As the squad watches, the little creatures right themselves and assemble into a neat line, then burrow under the snow only to reappear near the rubble.
They look like they’re searching.
‘What are they?’ Badoris asks quietly.
‘You’re the scientist,’ Terrick says to Memnes, somehow managing to make it sound like an insult.
‘I was a surgeon, actually. Not that …’ He sighs. ‘You don’t care.’
‘No,’ Terrick and Badoris say together.
Memnes crouches, looking closely at the squirming, creeping line. ‘I have heard stories. Cybermites. Repair insects seeded in the ground after an invasion. One mite builds another, then those two build four, then eight, then sixteen. It can take months. Years, even, as the swarm looks for minerals. Like ants searching for food. Eventually, the swarm reaches critical mass, and they start to … well. Do what they were made to do.’
Doubt is kneeling right where the mites are disappearing into the rubble. They’re tiny, so small it’s hard to believe they’re machines. Their shells are bright and shiny, as if brand new. She wonders whether they’d bite if she touched them. She wonders –
There is a click.
‘Doubt,’ Badoris says, her voice gentle.
Raoul and Memnes are looking at Doubt, too, and both have the oddest expressions on their faces. They all have their rifles up. In that instant, it is unclear to Doubt whether they are pointed at the line of insects or at her.
‘I think you should step away,’ Badoris says. ‘They might be dangerous.’
Doubt gets to her feet, and just like that their expressions return to normal.
Don’t apologise, Doubt thinks. Correct.
‘They’re more than dangerous,’ Memnes says, uncharacteristic determination in his voice. ‘We need to find where they’re coming from. The heart of the swarm. If we don’t shut them down, they could start rebuilding the broken steelers. A new legion, rising from the rubble. I don’t know about winning the war, but if they’re not stopped we’ll lose it for good.’
The silver insects still glitter and shine, but now it is the dangerous brightness of something poisonous and revolting.
‘Fine,’ Terrick says. ‘New mission. We find the source of the swarm, and we shut it down. Memnes, you take Doubt back to base.’
‘What?’ Doubt says. ‘No! I can help!’
‘With respect, Sergeant, you may need her. You may need both of us.’
Badoris and Raoul exchange glances. This is the first time any of them have heard the scientist stand up to Terrick.
‘You said this swarm repairs Cybermen,’ Terrick snaps. ‘I’m not risking bringing a recruit like Doubt anywhere near that. Or a recruit like you, for that matter.’ He glares down at the smaller man. ‘A surgeon. Was that what you were …’
‘Doubt?’ Memnes says, without breaking the sergeant’s hateful gaze. ‘Can you tell which direction the mites are coming from?’
‘That way,’ she says without thinking, pointing to the east, further into the city.
‘We need her,’ Memnes says. ‘You need her. And you need me, if this is going to work.’
Terrick holds the eye contact a second longer and then angrily shakes his head.
‘Fine. Let’s go.’
Doubt follows the silver flash, and the squad follows her. Every street they cross brings more of the shambling steelers – some walking in circles like wind-up toys, others scratching absently at their metal skin. Some stand as still as statues, staring upward as if waiting for the legion to come back. All are damaged. Limbs are missing. Great chunks have been carved away from chests and heads. Doubt sees a Cyberman, fully cut in half, dragging itself along a snowy street.
All of them are on edge, listening for that predator purr, but the whickering noise does not return.
Every so often, Terrick grudgingly consults with Doubt about which direction the insects are swarming in. They’re strange moments, taut with stress because of the hostility radiating from the sergeant like heat from a flame. But there is pride there too. Doubt finally feels useful. Feels she is finally helping in a way she could not before.
‘What are you going to do?’ Badoris asks that evening. ‘You know, after the war?’
The squad has made camp in a department store, the floor awash with trampled tinsel and confetti. Torn-down banners wish everyone a merry Christmas and promise peace to all.
Outside, the city is barely recognisable. The fighting was fiercer this far in. Whole blocks have been destroyed, towers ripped down, skyscrapers decapitated to make way for the Cybermen’s own constructions: steeples covered in circuitry, spindly sensor platforms, blocky facilities that stand stiffly on thousands of short silver legs. Agrippina has lost its entire air force. There hasn’t been an aerial photograph of the city taken since the first weeks of the war, but Doubt can imagine Agrippina Primus – with its jagged jigsaw of human and Cyberman architecture – looking not dissimilar to a snow-filled Cyberman skull.
Memnes has been watching Doubt. He thinks she hasn’t noticed, but she has.
‘Go back to work, I hope,’ he says in reply to Badoris. ‘Figure out how I can be of use. You?’
Badoris has her pulse rifle disassembled again. ‘I was a teacher. Hopefully, I’ll be one again.’
‘Don’t let Terrick hear you talking about this,’ Raoul calls from their post at the window, though in a rare display of relaxation they have taken off their helmet and let their fabulously long red hair hang down to their waist.
‘You don’t have retirement plans?’ Memnes asks.
Raoul snorts. ‘I follow the sergeant.’
‘Doubt,’ Memnes says suddenly, ‘what about you?’
Being asked feels like a badge of honour to Doubt, like she’s one of them at last, and so she shrugs the way Badoris did. ‘My mother and sisters were taken to one of the rural civilian hideouts up the coast. I’ll go there. Follow the coast until I find somewhere green. Maybe plant something and make it greener.’
It’s Raoul who smiles first. ‘That sounds lovely, kid.’
‘Yeah,’ Badoris chimes in. ‘I like that a lot.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Terrick asks, emerging from the shadows at the back of the store. There’s a strange, frantic energy to the big man now. After so long scouring the city for ration packs and
fuel cylinders, he finally has a real mission. A real war to fight.
‘Nothing,’ Memnes says. ‘Did you catch any sign of the aerial contact?’
Terrick shakes his head. ‘I didn’t know the steelers still had an aerial presence on Agrippina. We’ll have to be even more careful, moving out.’
‘A storm is coming,’ Raoul says from their perch by the window. ‘Might provide cover.’
The sky is far darker than it was moments ago – a black swirl. Storms never used to come this quickly. Some effect of the invasion, a poisoning of the atmosphere. Just one more thing the Cybermen left behind them.
Nothing to them. Everything to us.
The silver flashes are nearly everywhere Doubt looks now, tiny threads like strands of a spiderweb. She shakes her head. For a second, her thoughts feel gappy and distorted, twisted like the clouds outside. The air feels strange and, even though the wind is rising, motes of ashy snow hang in the air as if suspended in the fluid of a snow globe.
‘We should get moving,’ she says. It’s as though the threads are pulling at her, as though following them has tangled her up. She wonders if the same energy that has infected Terrick now fills her. ‘Shouldn’t we? I feel like … I feel …’
The storm breaks.
It isn’t loud. Snowstorms never are. But the air outside is suddenly blinding, churning white, puffing like static, and with it comes a roaring, rushing silence, an un-noise that drives all thoughts from Doubt’s head.
It makes the wheezing sound from earlier very easy to hear.
‘Run,’ Terrick shouts. ‘Run!’
They run, and the noise chases them.
Terrick shoulders through the back door of the department store, checking his corners as Raoul and Badoris rush past. Doubt and Memnes come next, stumbling and uncertain, and Doubt flinches as Terrick pushes her into the lead, her mouth and eyes suddenly filling with gritty grey snow.
‘You said you know where you’re going,’ the sergeant snaps. ‘So go.’
Doubt runs, and the squad runs with her, through snowfall so thick and urgent it’s almost solid. The noise comes with them – a warbling, wandering buzz. It sounds a little like Doubt’s mother, the angry hum she used to make when she forgot what she was saying in the middle of a sentence. A searching noise. An insistent noise.
Doubt tries to look up and see its source, but the storm is so fierce that when she does her eyes fill with snow and she has to scoop them clean.
They run down streets, and across plazas, and through parks where everything living has died. By some miracle, there are no Cybermen in their path. Maybe the flying thing scares them away. It scares Doubt – scares her in a way she has never been scared before.
And then, out of nowhere, looming through the storm like the prow of a ship, is the Cathedral Majoris, battlements and spires stretching skywards. It is gigantic and awe-inspiring, and it appears so suddenly Doubt freezes in her tracks.
Doubt always loved the cathedral. It wasn’t usually open to citizens; reserved for ceremonies of state and high society. At Christmas, though, the doors would be flung wide, and every soul wishing to celebrate was invited in. She remembers the queues, remembers showing up hours early and waiting in the cold. She remembers the hawkers selling hot wine and toasted chestnuts until the grim-looking altar servers chased them off. She remembers the towering doors inlaid with so much gold leaf that it was hard to see the wood underneath. Doubt used to trace the patterns with her fingers the way one might follow rain down glass.
Now, however, this is a cathedral to something else entirely. The gold leaf has been hacked away, a king’s ransom piled like discarded wrapping paper in the snow. The neatly trimmed hedges have been torn up and replaced with tangled gardens of cables, some sparking uselessly. New metal spires have risen around the cathedral’s steeple, crackling with energy, sending intermittent fingers of lightning up into the atmosphere.
And every inch of the cathedral pulses with a mat of writhing Cybermites, shimmering like the scales of a beast too big to exist. There are enough of them to rebuild an entire legion. Enough to be a legion, all by themselves.
This is the heart of the swarm.
Why, Doubt wonders, does it feel like coming home?
It takes Terrick and Memnes together to push just one of the cathedral doors ajar, both of them nervously eyeing the millions of Cybermites buzzing and clicking just metres from them. But the mites seem to have no interest in the soldiers, instead climbing over each other in great hanging drifts like sleeping bees.
The squad staggers into the long body of the building, shivering and patting snow from their shoulders. Snow has mounded across the flagstone floor. Statues have been toppled. And yet, despite the destruction, the great stained-glass window above the altar remains intact. In a city where every window is broken, it could almost be a miracle – if not for the fact that dozens upon dozens of steelers are standing before the altar like penitents. Each one is nearly invisible beneath a wriggling skin of Cybermites.
‘They’re being repaired,’ Memnes breathes. ‘We’re too late.’
Metal heads twitch. Hands clench and unclench. Occasionally, there is a low moan, somewhere between the cough of a jammed printer and the mutter of a prayer.
Badoris, Terrick and Raoul have their guns raised, but even Doubt can tell there’s no point. They’d all be dead before they had the chance to reload.
‘What do we do?’ Raoul whispers. They sound afraid. Doubt has never heard them sound afraid before.
Why am I not afraid? Doubt wonders. For a moment the snow-globe feeling returns, her thoughts a swirling, staticky soup. Something is unfolding inside her head, revealing itself like a skull beneath melting snow.
‘They’re not repairing,’ she says, and knows it to be true. ‘They’re searching.’
‘Searching,’ Memnes repeats. He sounds fascinated. ‘Searching for what?’
‘All the Cyber-Leaders are gone,’ Doubt says. ‘There’s nothing to unite all the steelers left behind. When the legion left, it took the war with it. These units are broken. Empty. Soldiers with no orders. Bodies with no minds.’ She thinks of the Cyberman tap-tapping on the post-office door. ‘Abandoned. Alone. Waiting for the Leaders who discarded them to tell them what to do.’
Anger rises in her, then. The war for Agrippina was hard-fought. Hard-won. Resources expended. Units downed, damaged, and then just left behind. What a waste. What a stupid, terrible waste. It offends her. Offends the very core of her.
Why? Why does it make me so angry? A shadow passes behind the final, unbroken window. Out of the storm comes that whirring, wailing noise again. Their pursuer knows they are close. It will not let them do what they came here to do.
Why did I think ‘hard-won’?
The stained-glass window explodes.
Shards rain down. Snow rushes in through the gap, and with it comes a shape – not a Cyber-creature, not some waspish steel monster come to convert them to death. It’s a box. A battered blue box that thrums and spins, landing with a crash between the steelers and the squad.
There is a long, shocked silence.
Then the door opens, and a man falls out.
‘You,’ he says accusingly from the floor, ‘are all in serious trouble.’
The man is blond. He is wearing white and red. There is what appears to be a stalk of celery pinned to his lapel. It’s the first green thing Doubt has seen since entering the city, and the sight of it oddly gladdens her heart.
‘Except you, my dear,’ he says, catching Doubt’s eye as he climbs to his feet. ‘You’re not in trouble at all.’
‘Who are you?’ Terrick snarls, rifle raised. ‘What is that box? Where did you come from?’
‘All wonderful questions,’ the man says, smoothing the vegetable on his lapel. ‘But I’ve a better one.’ He points at Doubt. ‘Why doesn’t she know who she is?’
‘What is he talking about?’ Doubt says, but before the sentence leaves her mouth the e
ntire squad, all but Memnes, are pointing their guns at her. ‘What … what are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Memnes. He looks sorry – his rifle slung, his hands held out as if reaching for hers. ‘But we wouldn’t just reprogram steelers for routine patrols. It’s been about finding the swarm. It’s always been about finding the swarm. You were our best chance.’
‘What …’
‘You and all the other Doubts.’
Doubt takes a step backwards. Flagstones crack under her tread.
There’s a raw recruit in every patrol.
Terrick’s inexplicable dislike for her, from the very day they met.
The ease with which she had slammed that steeler through a wall.
What will we do with all the people the Cybermen have converted? The people had asked. How will we change them back?
‘I have a mother,’ Doubt says suddenly. ‘I have sisters –’
‘What are their names?’ the newcomer asks from behind her.
‘I … I don’t …’
‘When did you join the resistance?’ he continues. She can see he is trying to be gentle, but the questions just highlight how little she knows. Her brain is a bombed-out city. There are craters. Gaps, where answers should be. ‘Where did you fight? What age are you? What did you do before the war? What are you going to do after?’
The Cybermites are humming dangerously now. Snow drools from the steelers’ slot mouths.
‘My mother and sisters were taken to one of the rural civilian hideouts up the coast. I’ll go there. Follow the coast until I find somewhere green. Maybe plant something and make it greener.’
It’s exactly what Doubt said earlier. Word for word. Like a line in a play. Why is it only now that she notices that? Why is it only now that she can hear her voice as a mechanical growl?
‘I don’t hate a lot of things,’ the blond man says, ‘but I hate that you gave her an afterwards. That, I think, was especially cruel.’
‘It wasn’t hard,’ Memnes says, and it’s somehow worse to Doubt that he can say such things and his voice still sounds the same. ‘We needed an early-warning system against the emergence of a repair swarm. A few memories hidden there. A few more created. Steelers all want orders. We just told this one to be a girl.’