Tajh and Nan stood point to the front and rear with the Minimis, but they kept turning back to see what the great secret of the boxes was all about. They saw a computer console emerge, to be fitted with a screen.
‘What the heck?’
‘Attack window,’ Brett cackled.
An even bigger surprise emerged from another crate. ‘Man alive,’ Cal muttered, ‘I can’t fucking believe this.’
Mark was equally astonished to watch Brett put together an unmistakable silvery outline with a wing span of about six feet from an assemblage of parts.
‘It’s a drone.’
‘To be accurate,’ Brett quipped, ‘this here baby is a UAV – an unmanned aerial vehicle.’
‘It’s a bleeding drone,’ Cal insisted.
‘Ain’t like no drone you ever seen,’ Brett whispered back. He motioned to Bull to help him carry it clear of the Pig so it stood bang in the middle of the road.
‘What are you up to?’ Cal asked.
‘The latest stealth tech, buddy.’
‘A spy drone?’ Cal’s voice sounded deeply sceptical.
‘The best eye in the sky there is. Now, I want you fellas to stand well back and let her do her thing.’
They watched as, with a buzz no louder than an electric shaver, the UAV took off and, within seconds, disappeared into the mist.
‘Ain’t no radar gonna pick up this baby.’
‘So, what’s the idea?’
Brett hauled the computer console up onto the bonnet of the Pig, swivelling the screen round so they could all see it. ‘You wanted to find out what we face up ahead.’ With his six foot three frame, he was tall enough to operate the controls from a standing position. In a few minutes they had a crystal clear aerial reconnaissance of the town up ahead.
‘How does it get a clear picture through the mist?’
‘Technology, like I told you.’
They saw figures in grey camouflage moving through buildings, many of which were in flames.
‘Paramilitaries!’
‘Looks like a whole platoon.’
They also had a clear view of the barrier on the other side of the stone bridge. Two APCs, one armed with a cannon, pointing straight down the approach road. The second APC sported a heavy gauge machine gun.
‘Shit!’ Cal muttered.
‘Shit, for sure,’ Brett agreed, ‘but useful shit to know.’ He waved Sharkey nearer. ‘Can you work with Cogwheel, connect me to your console in the Pig?’
‘Already working on it,’ Cogwheel said from inside the cab. ‘Sharkey, you getting the connection?’
‘I think so. I’m getting a good strong signal.’
Mark said, ‘Let’s see what’s going on in the streets.’
They watched people in obvious distress.
‘Can we move in closer, Brett?’
Brett twiddled with the console and the camera in the drone focused down. The picture was still crystal clear. People were being lined up against a wall. They looked like ordinary folk, some of them in what might be coats or dressing gowns thrown over what they had slept in. They saw the flares of gun muzzles, the people falling.
Cal’s eyes were popping: ‘Bloody hell! You see that?’
Tajh clasped his arm. ‘They’re killing people.’
Bull said, ‘We’re going in.’
‘But we’ll be cut to pieces on that approach road.’
‘No, fellas, we won’t. Not if I can help it. But you better get back on board the Pig.’
‘Right, everybody. Do what the man says.’
‘All but me – not just yet,’ Brett muttered.
Brett instructed Bull to dig out another of the long narrow crates. When he opened it, it contained what looked like another silvery drone assemblage. Brett and Bull hauled it twenty yards clear of the Mamma Pig.
‘Another of your UAVs?’ Mark muttered.
‘Not this baby.’ Brett stepped back as the drone-like thing became airborne.
‘What is it?’
‘Battlefield weapon.’ Brett hefted the console off the Pig and cradled it in one of his arms while typing instructions with the other. ‘Cogwheel – get ready to roll. Sharkey, keep the connection alive. I’ll join you at the very last moment.’
There was a pandemonium of activity as Bull and Cal armed up the two machine guns and the Mamma Pig inched forwards out of the tunnel of trees.
‘Cogwheel, Sharkey?’
‘We got it. We’re seeing what Brett is seeing.’
They were now visible from the barrier on the far side of the bridge. Cal muttered: ‘Keep inching her slow and steady, Cogwheel. We should be able to confuse them with our camouflage until we get as close as we can.’
‘Roger that,’ Sharkey responded with his Biggles voice, sitting shotgun with Cogwheel up front.
Mark was leaning over Cogwheel’s shoulder, looking ahead, watching through his eyes and through his oraculum for signs of activity.
‘Brett!’
The American was running alongside the Pig, looking down at the console in the crook of his arm, keeping pace with Cogwheel’s driving. ‘Hellfire and damnation! Keep that dang connection as long as you can!’
Bull’s enormous arm grabbed the back of Brett’s jacket and hauled him in through the port.
‘Right – Cogwheel! Put your bloody foot down.’
‘What foot?’
‘Put your bloody thumb on it, you shithouse. I can only hope this crazy American knows what he’s doing.’
‘They’ve clocked us. The cannon’s swivelling.’
The Pig was trundling faster, the engines screaming. Up ahead they saw that the gun had stopped swivelling. It was trained right up their nostrils. Any moment now they’d see the flash . . .
They saw the flash, but it wasn’t the cannon. The roadblock had disappeared. It was there one second, and in the next it was gone. They saw a cloud of roiling smoke and flame a split second before they saw bits and pieces rising high into the sky, and then the thunder of the explosion. They were riding into a fifty-foot wall of flame.
Cogwheel yelled, ‘What the fuck . . .?’
‘We go in, lads – all guns blazing.’
The Daemon Furnace
Stop! Look! Listen!
Gully felt so frightened he was recanting the mantra with his eyes squeezed shut. There was no way he dared to investigate his surroundings. He was trembling so much that he felt a faint coming on.
Darkness!
The darkness was back.
He began to pant. He was panting his breath, in and out, trying not to faint. He was back in the darkness, where things could wake him from sleep and hurt him. He was back in the darkness where nobody cared for him, the darkness before his Nan had come to rescue him. He was back in the darkness of being cursed and sworn at, in the darkness of being slapped and shoved into cupboards. He was back in the deepest darkness in which oily rainbows glittered amid the distant splatter of lights – lights that glinted and gambolled over shapes of things that terrified him.
No!
A sudden crunch of what sounded like devastatingly heavy machinery drove the memories from his mind. It was so gargantuan and violent that it made his breath catch in his throat. Then, the thunderous hammering began again. It seemed to Gully that he had fallen into the forge of one of them old giant gods, with a hammer the size of a truck thundering down onto an anvil the size of a row of shops. The deep, ear-splitting sounds reverberated through the iron floor under his feet. Then, when his ears felt wrecked with it, the thunder stopped, leaving him with a ringing that echoed within the vault of his skull.
Gully waited for the thunder to start up again, his heart pounding inside his chest.
This horrible place! Strewth, like . . . like some kind of a huge airplane hanger . . . and deep undergro
und.
He had lived in London all of his life and he had never seen no place like this. It was chock-a-block full of giant machines. He could hear the things now, all a whirring, pounding, pumping, clanking. Maybe I shouldn’t be afraid of just the pounding of machines? But it ain’t just the machines, is it? It’s the people – them wot’s operating the machines. Like the giant robot wot ain’t no robot at all but a daemon wot calls itself Bad Day.
Gully’s stomach felt like it had jumped up into his throat, so he was choking. He counted to twenty, patting his pockets: the five that remained to him. He breathed in and out of his open mouth. Piss’n’shit! He patted the place where the ‘Keys’ pocket had been. He missed it, the lost pocket, even though he had no use for no keys anymore.
He thought about all of it: Nah – it can’t be – it can’t possibly be real.
He waited a little while and then he told himself that none of this was real. And if it wasn’t real then it didn’t mean shit.
Stop, look, listen . . . Think again . . .
Even if it wasn’t real the fact was he was deep in shit. So deep Penny’s caution wasn’t going to save him.
Strewth! It’s just words, Penny. Words wot don’t mean noffink. Not here. Not here, in the darkness.
He began to count out another beat of twenty. He wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t real. That was the trouble. And he hated to go against Penny’s mantra. She was so clever in her thinking. So maybe the mantra was still true? He didn’t know what to think.
I don’t know noffink about wot’s wot no more.
The huge, thunderous hammering burst upon him again. Gully was back to panting in gasps from his pffing lips. His thoughts, his mind, was stopped dead by the thunderous clanking that was coming out of the pit. He crawled down into the lowest hole he could find and put his hands over his head. What kind of a hell was this? The hammering was followed by what could have been lightning strikes, and this in turn was followed by hailstorms of sparks. The sparks burned like nettle stings where they came down into the hidey hole where he was squatting, and made hissing contact with his skin. It took him several minutes to recognise that there was some kind of background humming. The humming was as disturbing as the massive noise and the lightning flashes. It made Gully put his hands over his ears and to rock backwards and forwards.
Oh, Penny – Penny, Penny, Penny!
Nothing that Bad Day had told him convinced Gully that he wasn’t trapped: a prisoner of the giant robot. The robot was no more than strung together bits of junk, but there was no consolation in that; it was terrifying to know that there was something else inside of the bot that was the real Bad Day. A daemon bot – that was what he had called himself. He was trapped here by a daemon bot, called Bad Day, who was the slave of somebody even more terrifying that he called the Master.
Them was the facts.
Oh, Penny! This is real serious stuff. This is . . . I don’t know wot the bleedin’ ’eck this is.
Gully put his hands up to his face. He scratched at his chin, then turned his head to one side and hissed through his teeth. This was worse than anything he could possibly have imagined. This was . . . like . . . kinda like maybe the end of the world serious. He felt tears squeezing out of his eyes.
But it didn’t do no good – no good bawling like some baby! It didn’t help. Didn’t do noffink, no way, no how.
I’m done for.
He tried counting slowly to a hundred, tapping on each of his five pockets in sequence, again and again. He tried his best to calm down. He tried to stamp down on his reeling thoughts. Might be there was something good to come out of this.
‘Yeah,’ he whispered to himself.
Might be that Bad Day had carried him all the way to where he had wanted to be, anyhow. He was back in London. And London was where Penny had to be, provided she hadn’t left it at the same time he had.
You got to get a grip, Gully!
He did his utmost to get a grip. I been captured, Penny. I got no idea wot captured me, or why. It really don’t feel so very good. It feels like maybe I made some kind of horrible mistake in my calculations. I ain’t got to expect . . . I reckon I ain’t got to expect noffink . . .
Gully clasped his head in his hands again. He just didn’t know what to do or where to go no more.
The great clangs of a hammer, the banging and sawing continued at intermittent intervals but he felt too fragged with worry to figure it.
Then he was dreaming. He knew that he was wandering through a panoramic despoiled landscape, with tottering buildings, flames roaring through rafters, smoke rising into the wheeling grey sky . . .
The voice came into his head from outside. He vaguely recognised it: it sounded like that Jamaican-sounding women, Henriette. There had been something really weird about her. Now he came to think about it, he thought that she was the weirdest woman he’d ever met. Gully had no idea how her voice could come into his head like that. I know it ain’t somefink I imagined up outta thin air, because I’d never ever have thought of her in a million years.
‘Forgive my arse!’
His resentment was so strong, and immediate, he woke up. He was sitting in the dark, with his back against a towering wall of rusting iron.
‘Like wot?’
The prevailing darkness squeezed his mind shut. That and the hammering, and the showers of livid sparks. What was he supposed to do in a place like this? He was bruised all over and his elbow still throbbed. He pressed his head back against the hard metal and the rust and he clenched his eyes shut.
That weird voice! It really sounded like Henriette.
‘Wot for?’
That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all.
‘No!’
‘Why – why do I gotta do it?’
‘Penny don’t care noffink for me. She left me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Then why’d she leave me?’
‘Why you telling me these fings?’
Gully’s head dropped.
He wasn’t altogether sure that he had ever really heard Henriette’s voice at all. But the conversation left him feeling more afraid than ever. He fiddled with the collar of his denim jacket, which felt slick with oil. If I’m gonna die, who cares? Nobody – nobody in the whole bleedin’ world’ll even notice.
But then, in another kind of a sense, it meant, like maybe, he could do whatever he wanted.
What was that supposed to mean? There’s light up ahead? All the light he could see was down there, in the distance, where all the hammering was going on and the sparks was flying. You got to be bonkers to go there. Every instinct told him that. Whatever was going on there, he didn’t want to know about it.
Stop, look, listen, Gully.
He peered into the distance, between the towering walls of iron. He tried to appraise his surroundings, which was far from easy in the near dark, and the flaring sparks and the thunder of hammering. His legs
didn’t feel like his own as he began to move, shuffling stiffly through oily patches glistening with reflections of the flaring fireworks, and past great jutting shoulders of rusting iron, through a gloom so dense it was like wading through water. The air grew hotter with every step. Yet, step by step, he forced himself forwards. The noise of the hammering climbed through his bones from his feet to his spine, and from his spine right up into his skull.
Whatever it was, the furnace of thunder and fire was just around the corner. Sweat was now soaking Gully’s clothes so that even his denim jacket was stuck to his T-shirt, which in turn was stuck to his skin. His ears were deafened by the thunder, his heart failing with fright at whatever lay ahead.
Henriette’s voice again – Henriette calling to him inside his head.
It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. It made him take another reluctant step, then another . . . another.
Then he saw it and terror consumed him.
‘No!’
A gigantic figure was working the forge: its head was horned, its face covered in what might have been black crocodile scales. The eye sockets blazed, and the molten-red of the volcanic flames glowed, spilling in flares through every junction and crevice of the armoured body. Its hands were massive claws covered in the same black scales, and a glowing molten lava was crackling out of every finger joint. Over its shoulders and back was a shell-like casing, maybe like that of a lobster. But then he noticed the shape of the casing. And it wasn’t like no lobster at all. It was two huge wings extending from above its head and right down to its horny feet. The wings was a glittering black. That great horned head was turning round, the blazing eyes rotating as if suddenly aware of his intrusion. Gully wanted to back away, but his legs wouldn’t carry him. He tumbled onto his knees before it.
‘I had planned it to be a surprise.’
The voice was the deep gentlemanly voice of Bad Day, but this monster was far more frightening than the walking robot. The hammer, every bit as gigantic as Gully had feared, was in its gauntleted fist.
‘Wot . . . are you?’
‘I am the servant of the Master.’
Even as the monster’s words entered Gully’s mind, a huge flare of orange-red flames and a wheeling storm of sparks emerged from the furnace. Only then did Gully notice what lay at the heart of the flames: a minuscule face. Gully was beginning to make out a ghostly outline, in fire and molten metal. A familiar outline . . .
The Return of the Arinn Page 20