by Garth Nix
Marg: Why?
Stelo: I didn’t want to leave him, Marg. I just didn’t want to leave him there alone. All by himself in the water….
Marg: Shush! There’s something moving over there! Is your Deceptor on?
Stelo: Yeah…it’s too small for a Ferret…. It’s one of his bloody rats! Kill it, kill the bastard!
You got your fucking robots out, Shade! But what about us? What about Peter? You don’t deserve—
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
If Shade had been expecting a dramatic response to his declaration, he was disappointed. Ella simply closed her eyes; Ninde shivered and drew closer to the radiator; Gold-Eye suddenly found that he couldn’t even imagine life without the effects of the Change. Only Drum spoke, his clear high voice laced with skepticism.
“How?”
“As a natural progression from my years of scientific investigation and research,” Shade announced, “I have discovered that the Projectors we see around the city are merely repeaters that convert a broadcast from a central Projector, breaking down its peculiar radiation for use by the Overlords and their creatures. It is this central or Grand Projector that creates the displacement field that created the Change and now maintains its effects.
“If that Grand Projector was ah…turned off…I believe that our normal reality would return, and the Overlords would be instantaneously translated back to wherever they came from—disappearing in the same way that all our people did at the moment of the Change. Similarly, without the Grand Projector sending power to the repeaters, all the creatures would die.”
“So we have to destroy the Grand Projector,” said Ella, in the tone that the others had heard many times before when Ella was focusing in on a new mission. “Where is it?”
“I believe the Grand Projector is located atop the highest point within several hundred miles,” said Shade. “Silverstone Mountain.”
“Where’s that?” asked Ninde. She was interested now, moving farther away from the radiator, not noticing that Gold-Eye was edging across to get more than his share of the heat.
“About a hundred miles away,” replied Shade. “To the northwest. But any expedition there will require careful planning. We can’t just rush into it. After all, we will probably get only one chance.”
“Destroying this Grand Projector will kill you too,” said Drum carefully. “You seem very calm about that.”
“It has been my life’s work to see the world…our world…put right,” said Shade, sounding as if he was delivering a speech to a giant rally rather than to four shivering people. “To reclaim the world for humanity…”
“But the Overlords are human!” Ninde blurted. “I read the thoughts of one.”
“They may seem human,” said Shade, waving two forelimbs aggressively. “But they do not represent humanity. They must be forced to return to whence they came!”
“You already knew they were human?” asked Ella, skirting around the giant spider robot to look at a particular green steel box with diamond-shaped orange stickers on it.
“I have long suspected they were related to humans in some way,” said Shade, turning his bulbous body to follow Ella. “I could not be sure until recently, when I migrated to this new host. The Thinker previously contained considerable data about the Overlords, and I have gathered more via some new communications resources…. Careful with that, Ella!”
The giant spider robot retreated quickly to the other end of the carriage as Ella opened the green box with the high-explosive warning stickers. It contained many items she had read about and studied in pictures, all neatly compartmentalized. Sticks of oily plastic explosive wrapped in grease-proof paper. Cotton reel-shaped primers of composite explosive. A small reel of orange detonation cord, and another reel of green safety fuse, next to a tin of long-headed matches.
She looked down on it longingly and said, “Where are the detonators? Do you have some?”
“Not if they’re not there,” said Shade. “One of my robots found it some time ago, and I’ve been keeping it here for safety, in the hope that an opportunity might arise.”
“It’s all useless without a detonator,” said Ella, thinking back to the manual of military explosives she’d read over and over, lying on her bunk in the Submarine. “But I guess I could…get one or two of those….”
Thinking about what the explosives could be used for, she added, “Is the Grand Projector like the normal Projectors? Sort of a silver ball?”
“Not exactly,” replied Shade evasively. “I believe it’s in a tower of some sort, built on the very pinnacle of the mountain. They would have built it—or had it built—by normal people, before the Change. And then the Overlords put the Grand Projector in and turned it on.”
“Well, we can discuss the plan in detail later,” Ella declared, seeing that Ninde and Gold-Eye were shivering and Drum was still in his wet suit. She had stopped shivering. It was as if she’d shrugged off the loss of the Submarine and all the rest of Shade’s Children and now could think only of the next operation. But she hadn’t lost her common sense.
“First off we’d all better get changed. Ninde, Gold-Eye, see what you can find in amongst this lot here. Drum, you’d better look for something that fits you. See if you can find some food, too.”
She did the same herself. Finding coveralls, underwear, and a towel, she carried them back down the other end and quickly got changed. Ninde, fossicking about more choosily, saw Gold-Eye watching Ella and elbowed him, accidentally hitting his injured hand. He yelped and blushed at the same time, hastily looking back down at the box of clothing.
“She’s too old for you,” laughed Ninde, causing Gold-Eye to blush again because Ella must have heard. In a whisper Ninde added, “And too tough. I bet she’d want to be on top all the time. I might not, though….”
Gold-Eye blushed again, finally understanding what she was talking about from his experience with “Sex Education I” and “II.” Ninde laughed again—but not unkindly—and ran back with her clothes to Ella.
Gold-Eye carefully didn’t look, keeping his back to them as he hastily stripped off his wet clothes and got a towel over his momentarily bare buttocks.
When he looked back up after slipping on new underpants, he saw Drum getting changed on the far steps, out of sight of the two women. He was slowly unpeeling the wet suit, revealing white, hairless skin rubbed red by several days in the tight neoprene.
Gold-Eye looked away again—and was gripped by the soon-to-be-now. He saw Drum naked, reaching down to pick up his underwear and XXL coveralls—and in that second, he saw the shriveled, hairless genitals that would have been normal only on a very young boy. And Gold-Eye suddenly understood what the Overlords’ steroids and drugs had done to Drum in the Training Grounds where Myrmidon muscle was bred.
He came out of the vision with Shade’s voice close to his ear and turned, instinctively shrinking back from the spider robot that was almost as tall as he was.
“Hurry up!” said Shade, his voice somehow less human now that it emanated from inside a robot spider and not a holographic person.
“Hurry up,” repeated Shade. “I want to hear what happened at the Central Pro—I mean, the Meat Factory.”
Gold-Eye nodded and quickly pulled on a T-shirt before sticking his arms back through the coveralls and zipping it up the front. Like the others, he hung his equipment belt up to dry but kept the sword with him.
“Before I forget,” Shade said, spider body clicking over to a red plastic box, “I have new Deceptors for you all. A new model. They don’t need batteries because they draw power directly from the Projectors. I think you’ll find that they don’t interfere as much with your Change Talents, either. My earlier design was somewhat heavy-handed; it put out too much wide-spectrum interference. Most of my robots have the new model now. As does this body.”
He
opened the box with one forelimb and, using the anemone tendrils on the end of another, pulled out four new Deceptor crowns. They looked flimsier than the old ones—more like open skullcaps of wire than crowns—and had no battery wires or connections.
Ella picked them up. As she bent back up, she noticed that in addition to the eight segmented legs on Shade’s new spider body, there were also two additional legs tucked up under the body—each ending in a sharply hooked knife. Like their own swords, with a tracery of gold upon the shining steel.
She handed the others their Deceptors, then tried hers on, frowning slightly as she felt a slight vibration at her temples.
Shade noticed her expression. “The vibration lets you know it’s working,” he said. “It’s not too annoying or unpleasant, I trust?”
Ella shook her head and looked at the others. Ninde and Gold-Eye had already put theirs on, but Drum was hesitating.
“It’s okay,” said Ella. “Better than worrying about the batteries going flat.”
Drum nodded and carefully put his on, stretching the thin wires across his great round head.
“Now,” said Shade, settling his spider-robot body down on its folded legs. “Put those meals on top of the radiator to get warm—and tell me all about the Meat Factory.”
ARCHIVE—OVERLORD COMMUNICATIONS
Transmission: Who…ah…you call yourself Shade. You have [Unknown symbol/meaning = Red Diamond’s] Thinker.
Reply: I am Shade. I have the Thinker—and information. I wish to make an agreement with you.
Transmission: We do not speak with animals.
Reply: I am not an animal.
Transmission: You are not from [Home]. The records have been examined. No new translations have been made. Therefore you are an animal.
Reply: I am not a biological entity.
Transmission: You are the technological progression of the entity called Leamington. You are using our Thinker. How did your agents enter the Central Processing Facility?
Reply: I will inform you, but you must meet my requirements. I will contact you again in one hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Despite Shade’s assurances that it was unnecessary, they kept a watch through the night. Two hours each, starting with Drum, ending with Ella, with Ninde and Gold-Eye in between.
Ninde woke Gold-Eye early, halfway through her own watch, putting her hand lightly on his mouth before shaking his shoulder.
He woke groggily, sitting up to a dark room lit by the red glow of the radiator and the glint of the rat robot’s eyes. There was no sign of the glowing spider robot that housed Shade.
Ninde’s hand traveled slowly across Gold-Eye’s mouth, then delicately traced the tendon in his neck till it came to rest just inside his T-shirt, cool against his collarbone.
“Ninde?” squeaked Gold-Eye. “What—”
“Shhhh…” breathed Ninde. She slid her hand around to the back of his neck. Feeling the smooth skin below the trace of stubble on his cheeks with her other hand, she grabbed Gold-Eye’s arm and put it around her waist, careful of his splinted fingers. Then she bent forward and brushed her lips gently against his.
Gold-Eye swallowed, suddenly dry-mouthed, and instinctively moved his arm more tightly around her. She moved close against him, and he slowly subsided back onto his blankets—with Ninde on top.
“Should be watching,” Gold-Eye whispered halfheartedly as she kissed his forehead and eyes. Then, “Shade?” questioningly as she slowly unzipped his coveralls and pushed up his T-shirt to run her hands up his ribs.
Then he didn’t ask any more questions, and they were somehow under his blankets and not on top of them, and he felt the aching, desperate desire to do more than just explore each other’s bodies with fingers and mouths and skin against skin.
But both were products of Shade’s “Sex Education I” and “II”—and they didn’t have a condom. Or three. Both knew pregnancy was quite possible from the first time—and both knew it would mean terrible danger and almost certain capture for a woman who was pregnant. They knew it, but still Ninde had to remind Gold-Eye of that fact more than once, and herself, too.
So finally they just lay together and whispered, slowly drawing their clothes back on in an effort to suppress desire.
Across from them, not ten feet away, Ella lay awake, listening, hoping they’d be sensible. She remembered her first sexual experiences, in the year or so she’d been in the Lottery. Before she realized that sex only made her closer to people, made it easier to love them, made it so much harder to bear when they were lost—and then Drum had come along and it had seemed unfair…. She hoped he was asleep, oblivious to what Ninde and Gold-Eye obviously believed were well-muffled sighs and groans. But she knew he wasn’t.
Half an hour before her watch began, she made a show of waking up, twitching and muttering for several minutes before acting out a sudden awakening, as if from a bad dream.
“Anything happen?” she asked a nervous Gold-Eye as she did up her equipment belt and slipped her sword back in the scabbard.
“No-nothing,” stuttered Gold-Eye, scuttling back to his blankets, nearly tripping over Ninde, who had already returned to her own makeshift bed.
“Good,” whispered Ella, half smiling. She waited for Gold-Eye to settle, then began her watch.
At six she woke everyone, judging it to be morning, though no sunlight showed this far down the tunnel. Shade still wasn’t back from wherever he’d gone, so after a good breakfast they sorted through the stores, packing backpacks with spare clothes, food, and other useful items. Ella emptied the explosives box onto the floor, but there was too much to fit in their already bulging packs.
She was working out what to take when Shade returned. Water ran from the crystal spider body as it clicked slowly up the steps.
“Bad news, that water,” said Shade. If he’d been human, Gold-Eye would have sworn he was tired. “No wonder the creatures avoid it. Very little Projector power. Had to use auxiliary electric batteries. Most frustrating. Wouldn’t want to do that again in a hurry.”
“I thought we’d probably go out straightaway,” said Ella, putting down a couple of sticks of the plastic explosive.
“Yes…yes…no time like the present,” declared Shade. “The sooner it’s done…the sooner…well, I am sure everyone looks forward to final victory.”
“Good,” said Ella, returning to the explosives laid out on the floor. “We’ll just finish packing….”
“Don’t worry about that stuff,” said Shade, moving toward her. “One of my robots can carry that box. That’s how it got here in the first place. Look.”
One of the normal-sized robots twitched as he spoke, extending its legs till it stood up. Then it quickly crossed to the empty box. Balancing with its front and back pairs of legs, it used the other four to set the box squarely on its rounded back. Something clanked inside its body, and the box was fixed in place.
“Electromagnet,” said Shade with satisfaction. “It won’t come off till I tell it to. Just load up, my dear, and I’ll go over my projected route.”
He laughed for no apparent reason, and a laser beam shot out from his underbelly. Familiar motes of light swarmed around it in preparation for a hologram—this time a map of the city and surrounding territory.
“Projected route,” chuckled Shade. “Rather good, don’t you think?”
Nobody laughed, but this didn’t alter Shade’s obviously good mood. Using another laser as a pointer, he outlined the route they would take from the tunnel to Mount Silverstone.
“From here we’ll follow the Eastern Line railway t
o Central Station, but not through the tunnels here and here—they’re full of Ferrets, so we’ll go up. From Central we simply follow the Great Western Line out, crossing the Williams River via the railway bridge. Then we’ll leave the railway to take the Old Highway up through the hills here, and so on to Vanson. From Vanson we’ll climb up the Crookback Range using the service road under the chair lift and so on to Mount Silverstone, at the northwestern end of the range. If all goes well, I estimate it will take us about a week to walk it. Any questions?”
“Do you know anything about what the Overlords do west of the Dormitories?” asked Ella.
“Nothing, I think,” said Shade. “There are Winger patrols looking for escapees, but I don’t think they fight battles over anything beyond the Williams River Raceway. Not that my rat eyes have seen, anyway.”
“And we trust these new Deceptors to keep us safe from creatures all the way?” asked Drum, touching the wires around his head. “There’s no shelter from Wingers outside the city.”
“I assure you they work perfectly,” said Shade, clicking his forelegs against the floor with some impatience. “The only place they won’t work is where there is no Projector power at all. The middle of a big lake, perhaps, or a long way underground.”
“How high is mountain?” asked Gold-Eye, looking at the hologram. The topography of the map was displayed in different colors, building up a three-dimensional effect. Both the Crookback Range and Mount Silverstone looked awfully big.