The Iron Fist

by Andy Briggs

  Lee punched a button on his mobile phone and Charles’s magnetic cuffs immediately went to full power – snapping his hands painfully together in front of him.

  Charles slumped back in his chair. “You are mistaken if you think Devon will just be hiding in there, hoping you won’t find him. By now he probably already knows that you’re looking for Iron Fist.” Charles enjoyed the worried look on Lee’s face. “He’ll take the initiative and will be plotting to stop you. And he’s more than one step ahead…”

  “So what’s the plan?” Lot asked in a low voice.

  “Hide.” Dev made sure to use his best matter-of-fact voice. “And we get as far away from those creeps as possible. Whatever they’re looking for, I don’t want to know.”

  They had scrambled along the shelving stack, inching around one helicopter fuselage after another. The scrapped advanced prototype machines were so big they barely fitted on the shelving space even with their rotors swept back and tied in place with heavy cables. Each vehicle was slightly different – a larger canopy, corkscrewed rotors or bulging weapon pods. In places there was hardly any space to squeeze past and they had to be careful where they placed their feet. Dev loathed heights and he felt his pulse quicken and his palms turn sweaty every time he looked down.

  Midway along the shelf they came across a ladder bolted to the side of the stack. It stretched to the shelf below. Dev found that even scarier. It was an open ladder with no safety cage, nothing to stop them plummeting to their deaths. In all his time at the Inventory he had never explored the high shelves. He had been up once or twice with his uncle using a cherry-picker crane, but he hadn’t felt safe even in the relative comfort of the crane’s basket.

  Still, it was the only way down.

  The moment they descended to the third level, Dev had to sit down to stop his legs from shaking. This shelf was filled with drones and yet more helicopters; these, however, didn’t have rotors. Some had giant fans bolted to their sides, while others had more delicate and revolutionary engines constructed from a fine web of wires.

  “These are incredible,” said Lot, impressed. She ran a hand along a fuselage. She had been around aircraft her whole life but had never seen anything like this.

  “I wish we could just start one up and fly out of here,” Dev said, closing his eyes in an attempt to calm himself.

  “I could probably fly it,” said Lot. Dev wasn’t surprised to see she was serious. “My dad took me up for a few lessons in a training chopper. It’s easy … well, after a while it is.”

  Mason sniggered. “Is there nothing you can’t do?”

  Lot looked thoughtful. “My dad always says there’s nothing you can’t do if you try hard enough. He always says, ‘Lot, you keep flying high.’” She smiled – a smile that quickly faded. She hoped she’d live long enough to see him again.

  “We just need to keep low and stay quiet,” said Dev flatly.

  “And who will come to rescue us?” said Mason. The OmniBoard chase had left him sullen and subdued. Dev could tell he was frightened, but didn’t have the heart to taunt him. Like it or not, he and his nemesis were stuck together for now.

  “And what about your uncle?” said Lot.

  Dev felt a twinge of guilt that they hadn’t even attempted to check if his uncle was safe, but he was the one who’d imprisoned them in the canteen. He was sure Charles Parker was more than capable of looking after himself.

  The faint rumble of an engine got their attention, but from their vantage point they could see nothing. Lot and Mason looked at Dev expectantly, and reluctantly he realized that they were looking to him for leadership.

  Taking a deep breath, and ignoring his shaking legs, Dev swung out on to the ladder and climbed halfway up to get a better view. From there he could just see movement between the distant aisles across the warehouse.

  “It’s a tank,” he breathed.

  “A tank?” Lot echoed. “Are they going to shoot our hiding place apart?”

  The heavy war machine passed deeper into the hangar. Dev couldn’t make out the model, but there were dozens of them in storage. “I bet they’re using it to break into the next zone. This isn’t just an ordinary heist; they’re ignoring most of the things in here. They’re looking for something specific.”

  “Iron Fist,” said Mason suddenly. “That’s what those guys back in the corridor were talking about. What is it?”

  Dev shook his head. “Never heard of it. Then again, I have no idea what’s really in here. I don’t even think my uncle knows. This place has been around for a long time.”

  “How long?” asked Lot.

  “I think President Washington and Prime Minister Pitt the Younger started off the World Consortium … so that was, um, way back.” Dev’s grasp of history was thin at the best of times and he was now regretting not having listened during lessons. Finally history might have a use. “Anyway, whatever Iron Fist is, they’re going to have a lot of trouble getting to it.”

  “But what if they do?”

  “They won’t.”

  Lot folded her arms and looked insistently at him. “But what if they do? They have a tank now, after all. Are we talking end of the world type stuff?”

  Dev was about to laugh off the suggestion, but couldn’t muster the will to deceive her. He knew how dangerous some of the items were. It wasn’t inconceivable that there was a doomsday machine deep inside the Inventory. In fact, when he thought about it, he realized there could be dozens of world-ending machines in here. Keeping that kind of power out of people’s hands was the purpose of the Inventory, after all.

  He shrugged.

  Mason looked thoughtful. “How big is this place?”

  Dev opened an art app on his watch and the holographic image expanded over his arm. He drew a series of three interlocking circles resembling half the Olympic symbol.

  “OK, these are the three main corridors. There are dormitories, the canteen, general storage areas, workshops and repair facilities. It was originally designed to house hundreds of staff, now there’s just the two of us. And Eema.”

  “A fat lot of good your security has been,” sniffed Lot. “All Eema managed was to lock us in a room. And even that was easy to get out of, thanks to Mase.”

  Mason blushed at the compliment.

  Dev didn’t reply. Eema’s ineffectiveness had been bothering him. He drew a large box at the bottom of the circles. “This is the Yellow Zone we are in now. It’s designed to allow access through the roof.” He pointed to a colossal closed door in the roof above, like the sliding roofs in sporting stadiums, only on a much grander scale. “There are a couple of those. And platforms like this are raised and lowered so vehicles could be brought down.”

  Lot realized the pit they were in made sense. It was actually a colossal elevator that could rise up to ground level. At the moment the platform had been lowered down, just like a mechanic’s pit.

  “So why don’t we just switch the elevator on and go up?” asked Mason.

  “Because it takes hours to get to the roof, by which time the guys with guns could have stopped for a coffee, got a haircut, then strolled over and caught us. Besides, the controls are back in the command bunker.” He tapped a tiny dot on one of the corridor rings.

  Dev added another two boxes following on from the Yellow Zone. “Through the next door is the Blue Zone. Much higher security. I’ve only been in there a few times myself. Beyond that – well, I have no idea just how many rooms there are and what the layout is. I know the Red Zone is somewhere down here. That’s one of the places I’m forbidden from entering.”

  “Why?” asked Lot.

  “My uncle always told me it was ‘need to know’ security.”

  Lot smiled. “And let me guess. He thought you didn’t need to know?” She met Dev’s gaze and must have read the unhappiness there because her expression softened. “It must have been very lonely growing up here.”

  Dev nodded. He wasn’t used to having anybody he could talk to. Lett
ing off steam usually involved shouting at Eema, and it was impossible to check if the bodiless artificial intelligence was paying attention.

  “Why don’t we just ask your computer for help?” said Mason, pointing at Dev’s watch.

  Dev shot him an annoyed look. “Because, genius, Eema’s not responding. I bet they’re blocking the Wi-Fi.”

  “But you put our pictures on that Trojan virus of yours,” Lot pointed out. “You managed to get into the system then.”

  “That’s because they had hardwired their laptop straight into the network.”

  Lot smiled. “Then why don’t we?” She pointed up to the ceiling another four storeys above them. Catwalks stretched precariously overhead. They were there in case maintenance needed to be carried out on the air-conditioning conduits and masses of wiring that ran across the warehouse. “I can see a whole bunch of cables,” she pointed out.

  Dev started to feel a glimmer of hope – but it was extinguished when reality caught up with him. “There’s no way we can get up there. The access ladders are against the walls and they’ll see us coming.”

  “We don’t need a ladder,” said Lot as she tapped his forehead with her finger. “We need imagination.”

  “Sure. We’ll just pull out one of the engines out of a chopper and float right up,” Dev laughed.

  He stopped when he saw Lot’s face. She was being serious.

  The mercenary stared at the door ahead of them. It was twice the size of the portal they’d frozen and shattered to gain access to the Yellow Zone. He reached out to touch the smooth cobalt-blue surface – but Fermi yanked his hand away.

  “Don’t touch it,” she warned. “The doors are made from smart materials. The adaptive security system knows we froze and shattered the last door, so…”

  She pulled a water bottle from a clip on her belt and squirted it at the door. The water froze the instant it touched the surface, the entire arc of water solidifying, right back to the neck of the bottle, which she snatched away before the bottle froze too.

  “I would’ve lost my fingers!” the mercenary said in alarm.

  “At the very least. The adaptive security won’t let us use the same trick twice.”

  “If it’s like ice, we can smash through it.”

  Fermi shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s cold. Not brittle. We’re going to need something that packs a punch.”

  She turned to look at the tank that was slowly driving towards them.

  “This is a bad idea,” said Dev for the fifth time.

  “I totally agree,” said Mason nervously.

  “Quit complaining and give me a hand,” said Lot as she kicked the end of a wrench to unfasten the last bolt holding the engine in place. Two solid aims and the bolt finally began to turn.

  It had taken an assortment of tools, lifted from the numerous toolboxes mounted to every shelf in the Inventory, to get this far. Once the stubborn bolt was out, the three of them lifted the turbine from the stubby aircraft’s wing. Lot had wanted them to try to fly the entire craft, but Dev pointed to a red tag on the other engine indicating that it was broken.

  The machine they now held was circular, about the size of a coffee table, and surprisingly light. Dev had selected the small two-seater craft, as he knew this was one of a range that employed silent engine technology; the engines were made from a lattice of wires held in a circular frame rather than from noisy moving parts. A high-voltage electric current was passed through them and, by some bizarre quirk of physics, the ionized air lifted the engine. It was a cheap, efficient technology, but because scientists decided it couldn’t work without rewriting a few lines of physics, it was thrown into the Inventory.

  “How do you know about these?” said Lot. In all the time spent with her father at military bases, she had never seen the likes of this before.

  “IonoCraft are cool,” said Dev with a shrug. “I used to make them out of spare parts all the time. Thomas Townsend Brown invented them in the 1920s and…” He noticed they were both giving him a weird look. “It doesn’t matter. You can look it up on the net.”

  They placed the IonoEngine in a clear space. “We all hold on to this,” said Dev, motioning to the circular ring around the engine that had attached it to the craft, and which now provided a convenient handhold.

  Next he pulled batteries no bigger than a mobile phone from the craft, and connected them to wires, which he yanked out of the cockpit dashboard.

  He closed his eyes and ran his hand around the engine as if searching for something. “That’s all green and smooth,” he said cryptically. When he opened his eyes he saw Lot staring at him.

  “You’re being weird again,” she warned.

  “I’m just trying to see how this works.”

  “You do know that makes you sound weirder?”

  Dev didn’t have time to explain. He slipped a battery into Lot’s pocket and attached the wires to a port in the ring. He repeated the process for Mason and himself, although he didn’t plug his own battery in.

  “We’ll have enough juice to gently lift us up,” said Dev, “and we’ll keep going up like a helium balloon. We hang on and swing our bodies in the direction we want to move and the engine will drift that way. Got it?”

  The other two nodded reluctantly; Mason somewhat more reluctantly than Lot. “If this place has so many gadgets, where are the rocket packs?” he huffed.

  “In a more secure zone,” said Dev. “You know in a movie when the hero gets all the cool gadgets at the beginning, then it just so happens that every situation he comes to is perfectly suited for the tech he has?” Mason nodded. “Well, this is nothing like that. We have to improvise with what we’ve got – so let’s do it.”

  Standing equal distances apart, they knelt and held on to the IonoEngine’s mounting ring. Dev plugged his battery into the port. “Here we go!”

  There was a faint sizzle of air, and the hairs on his arm rose as the current surged through the engine.

  Then it began to rise. Their movements were enough to gently steer the ring towards the edge of the unit before they ascended towards the shelf above.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god…” Mason muttered as his feet slid off the edge of the shelf.

  Dev felt the firm ledge under his feet disappear, but he didn’t look down. He kept his gaze on Lot, who was grinning like an idiot.

  “This is brilliant!” she shrieked, before lowering her voice in case they were overheard. “I love it!”

  Clear of the shelf, the engine righted itself and they rose silently upwards. Their speed was no more than walking pace, and Dev could feel his arms beginning to ache. He mentally kicked himself for not lashing his belt around the ring to secure him. If his arms gave up now, he would plunge to his death. Maybe he should have mentioned that to Lot and Mason too. He kept his eyes on their destination above, trying to ignore the drop below.

  Still they rose. The gentle movement and lack of noise made the journey feel safe, and Dev could almost ignore the deadly drop. Out of the corner of his eye he saw they had not only cleared the elevator pit but the shelving stacks in the rest of the Inventory too. With a tremor of panic he calculated that they were at least eight storeys up…

  And rising.

  Watching the catwalk draw nearer was a painfully slow experience, and ignoring the aching in his arms was becoming increasingly difficult.

  The catwalk was almost in arm’s reach. Twenty more seconds and they would be there.

  Then a soft bleep caught their attention. They all looked around, wondering where the sound was coming from.

  “Mase, you’re bleeping,” said Lot, who had traced the noise to Mason’s pocket. “There’s a light flashing in your pocket … it’s the battery.”

  “Oh no…” Dev felt his arms go weak as he realized what was happening. “It’s a battery warning. They’ve been in storage for decades … we should have charged them!”

  Lot stared at Dev. “Are you telling me…” She trailed off as the IonoEngine beg
an to slow.

  Dev made the mistake of looking down. He could see his trainers dangling in the air – and then far below his feet were canyons of shelving units that looked like the network of streets at the bottom of a high-rise metropolis.

  He suddenly felt weak. His fingers began to slip, and it felt as if gravity was clawing at him – determined to pluck them from the sky.

  At that moment the IonoEngine stopped its ascent. They hovered in the air, just out of reach of the catwalk and safety.

  Frantically Dev grabbed at the catwalk rail. It was tantalizingly out of reach. His other arm was trembling with the effort of holding on to the IonoEngine’s mounting ring. “Try swinging,” he said, struggling to control the panic in his voice.

  All three of them flung out their legs in an attempt to build momentum. Mason was the heaviest, and as his body lurched on the far side of the ring, the engine began to drift in the opposite direction from the catwalk.

  “STOP!” yelled Dev.

  Mason stopped wriggling and the engine righted itself into a stationary hover. Dev strained for the catwalk again – but it was no good.

  BEEP.

  Now his battery joined the doom-laden choir.

  “As the power goes, we’ll just drift down, right? Like a feather?” Lot asked with as much optimism as she could muster.

  Dev admired her ability to remain so upbeat when they were close to certain death. “No. We’ll drop like a stone,” he replied. “That’s one of the safety issues with IonoCraft.”

  “Guaranteed death?” said Mason. “That’s one heck of a safety issue. Well, mate, thanks for getting us killed.”

  “I’ve never been your ‘mate’,” growled Dev as his free hand grabbed the engine’s ring to take the strain off his other aching arm. What should he do now? His uncle had taught him to see problems from different angles. Take a step back and see the whole picture, Charles Parker often said. While dangling above the ground was a physical handicap, Dev took a mental step back and tried to expel the fear that was clouding his judgement.