by Mark Lingane
“Say that again.” He wiped the fluid off the pages of the book open in front of him.
“I want to go,” Melanie repeated, staring defiantly and suited up in full training equipment. During the night when she closed her eyes, she was haunted by the vision of Gavin cheerily smiling as he left, but returning in a zipped-up canvas bag. She was being torn in two, but she couldn’t let him go into battle. Not again.
“Not in a million years!”
“Why not? You’re sending the teslas. And, let’s face facts, they are not the most terrifying or capable people on the battlefield.”
“To bring them on this wasn’t my idea. I only wanted them on patrols. I’ve been overruled.”
“But if a patrol is surprised, then what’s the difference?”
“The difference is, they are meant to detect a skynet first so conflict can be avoided.”
“You can hardly guarantee that. They are inevitably going to face war. And if they can, then so can I.”
“No.”
“But what have I been training for? And with Gavin … it’s so …” She folded her arms and stared at her feet, lost in her emotions.
Nikola closed the book and placed it back on the shelves over the table and focused his attention on her. “Because you’re developing into a great fighter. Sometimes the strongest people need to be around that which needs to be protected the most.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Sebastian came to me for protection. While I breathe, he will be safe. You are my guarantee to him.”
“But why do I have to do it? He’s in a fortress; isn’t that enough?”
“The cyborgs are building some type of city destroyer. If they get in, no one will be safe. I need to take precautions.”
“Oh, come on. You want me to nursemaid him? Why?”
Nikola sighed. “Because I said so.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“Well, technically I am. That’s what ‘commander’ means.” He leaned forward on the desk, resting on his hands. “This is something you will trust me on.”
“Why should I trust you when you’re so secretive?”
“Because I’m so secretive. In the same way that I know your real name, I know what you did, and I know why you ran, yet I haven’t told the authorities you are here.”
She shut her mouth and thought heavily about that statement.
“You need to trust me. And to do the adult thing, you will trust me. I hope one day to repay you for that trust. You will learn; you will see; and you will understand. But not today.”
“You can’t stop me.”
Nikola reached for his sword by his desk. Melanie could see the anger in his eyes and noted the ease with which he held the enormous weapon in his bulging arms. Nikola stepped toward her, and she looked up at his massive frame, suddenly feeling dwarfed by his presence. He slipped the sword over his shoulder into the scabbard on his back and walked around her.
He glanced back as he opened the door to leave. “I’m hoping I don’t need to.”
“Have you ever been out the back of the city to the dumping grounds?” said Isaac.
The general consensus among the boys was that the ball had been a success, and the opposite gender were not the most disgusting and dull things on the planet, although they still did smell funny. Many had considered the upcoming excursion into enemy territory with quiet optimism. After all, they would have the element of surprise for the first time. And most had woken the morning after the ball feeling upbeat. Most, except for Sebastian.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “What’s out there?”
“Garbage and stuff.”
“Sounds like a blast. How come we’ve been avoiding it all this time? Dumping grounds are the one place I love to be when it’s hot. Garbage and stuff, mmm. What an awesome day out.”
“No need to be like that. It was just an idea.”
“Pretty stupid idea.” Sebastian mulled over the other opportunities presenting themselves to the day, which numbered zero. “But since we’ve got nothing else to do, let’s go.”
Isaac leaped up and slipped on his flat cap, and gave Sebastian a smile. They dashed up the dormitory stairs and wound their way through the narrow cobbled streets that formed the complex maze of ad-hoc town planning, with the sun beating down on them, until they came to the city’s western gate. It was shut, but the gatehouse next to it was open for daytime activities. Once, during the day, people had been allowed through with minimal scrutiny. As the conflict continued, security had been tightened. Today, with a garrison of soldiers outside, the thin doorway was considered safe, allowing sufficient space for individuals to walk outside, but it would block an army trying to squeeze in. Especially an army with fat sergeants like the one sitting at the table.
He smiled thinly at the boys as they ran through, and watched them closely as they ran off into the wilds outside, recording their departure in his Suspicious Movements notebook.
In minutes, Isaac was halfway up the largest mound, which stuck up severely from the surrounding plain, indicating frantically for Sebastian to catch up. Sebastian could see bits of old metal scattered, buried, twisted, and tortured by the sun and sand. Running up the mound was hard work, harder than he was expecting a sand dune to be. The sides were unnaturally steep.
“This isn’t an ordinary hill,” he said as he crested the top.
“Isn’t it?”
Sebastian scuffed around various spots, digging with his heel to see what he could unearth. The soil had been cooked hard over the years and failed to budge. He closed his eyes and tilted his head.
“This hill has a power source,” he whispered more to himself than to Isaac.
The path they had just come up was a symmetrical semicircle. Sebastian wandered along the rising crescent shape to the highest point. From the top, the pathway fell away and terminated in a steep slope. He started to walk down, but ended running as his momentum picked up. His legs went faster than he could control and he hurtled into the air before tumbling into the sand.
He got up and dusted himself down. “Planned to do that,” he shouted back at Isaac.
As he continued to empty sand out of his pockets, he noticed that the surface of the hill seemed peculiar. He ran his hand over the wall closest to him. It was hard. He picked up a rock and chipped away at the sand until some of it started to fall away. He continued to pound into the hardened sand until it suddenly clanged. He rubbed his hand over the surface. It felt smooth, unlike anything he’d ever touched. But under it was something metal, something massive.
A couple of minutes later, Isaac had joined him. “What are you doing?”
“There’s metal under here,” replied Sebastian.
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of junk in this hill, bits and pieces, old derelict stuff dumped over the years. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few pieces were buried here.”
“No, it’s all metal. The whole hill is metal. At least whatever is below this strange material is metal.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way.”
Isaac ran his eyes over the huge scale of the mound. “Nah. Hey, look, I can see some old hydrolifts.” He pointed at some half-buried pieces of rusted metal a hundred yards away. He left Sebastian examining the mound.
Isaac’s cursing, as he kicked the bits of old metal, came floating over
“It’s no good,” Sebastian muttered. “I’m too close.”
He ran back over the sand for several minutes and then turned. Sebastian closed his eyes and reached toward the buried shape. It was still too big. He turned and ran further until he was out of breath. Turning, he could sense the huge object within his field of perception, but it was too weak to outline any definite shape.
He started to walk toward it again with his eyes closed, hoping he wouldn’t trip. With each step, definition grew stronger, but the object was growing too quickly. He knew he only had a few steps before he was going to be too close again. Then
it was too close.
A large eye was staring straight at him.
An enormous metal animal lay under the hill, one that had been there for centuries.
He wondered who else knew about it.
“Hey, Sebastian, check this out.”
Isaac’s voice came from the other side of the hill. Sebastian wandered toward him, thinking about what he had unearthed. He had so many questions he wanted to ask, and he knew only one person who could help.
As he rounded the hill, he was surprised to see a dozen airships being dragged out of the city gates by SUVs. The huge metal pods, each the size of a small hut, were on the back of carts with wheels bigger than a horse. In turn, they supported half-inflated balloons. Zeppelins. Sebastian couldn’t believe his eyes. Armored pods hung beneath the huge balloons, huge sheets of metal pierced and held together by large rivets. Each had four cannons protruding from each side. Scores of men ran around the slow-moving vehicles, shouting and pointing in various directions.
Sebastian recognized the captain from the ball and sidled up to him.
“This looks intense. Are you expecting trouble?”
“We are the trouble. And the cyborgs won’t be expecting us. It’ll be the ultimate surprise.”
“If you haven’t attacked before, and you’re going into unknown territory, how can you be so confident? They have some pretty advanced weapons.” Sebastian couldn’t shake the image of the cyborgs chasing him through the forest. He thought they were almost unstoppable, unless you had a Merv on hand to protect you.
“We have keener minds than the cyborgs,” the captain said. “Nikola’s information from the hive has been invaluable. They have an army that can only follow one instruction. We have trained soldiers who can think and react on their feet, who assess circumstances and adapt. We have superior military knowhow.”
Sebastian wasn’t sure how far superior knowhow could get you against a great scary army of dragons and laser guns, but he knew he wasn’t a military expert, so he left it to those who said they knew better. He wandered off to look for Isaac.
Isaac had found Nikola. The two were standing next to each other, with Nikola shouting various technical orders to the men working on the Zeppelins.
“Hello, Sebastian,” Nikola said. “Good to see you getting some fresh air.”
“Will you be going with them?” Sebastian asked.
“Number Two says I can’t go.”
“Will Number Two be going?”
Nikola laughed. “Only Number Two knows that.”
“And Number One?”
Nikola laughed again. “I severely doubt that. The chances of Number One going are about the same as you going.”
“Have you ever seen Number One?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. Maybe you should ask the same questions of yourself.”
Sebastian scratched his head as he puzzled over Nikola’s response, but the spectacle of the Zeppelins being prepared for flight had soon erased it from his mind.
“Nikola, how do these work?” he asked.
“We fill the balloons with helium, which is lighter than air, and the Zeppelins float.”
“How can anything be lighter than air?”
Nikola explained that helium weighs 0.1785 grams per liter, and nitrogen, which makes up eighty percent of the air we breathe, weighs 1.2506 grams per liter. If one bottle were filled with helium and another with air, the one filled with helium would weigh one gram less than the bottle with air.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot,” Nikola told them, “but that’s why blimps and balloons are usually very big. The one-gram difference really adds up in large volumes. Helium balloons follow the same principle as you do when you float in the water. It’s the law of buoyancy. If the water you displace weighs more than you do, you’ll float.”
Isaac looked terminally bored.
Sebastian absorbed the information. He thought how it applied to farting in the bath. It made sense. A fart would weigh less than the water. He wondered how potent a fart would have to be to sink. Maybe a heavy red-meat diet was required. Then you could capture it in a glass and take it with you. Could be something worth experimenting with.
“Sebastian, pay attention,” Nikola said.
“Sorry, I got distracted thinking about gases.”
“The gas lifts the balloon into the air. So tell me, how do we make it go back down?”
“Let the gas out?”
“Correct. What if we want to go back up?”
“I don’t know. You’d need more gas, wouldn’t you? So unless you carry it with you … but that would also make you lift into the air.”
“What if we compressed it so much that it became a liquid?”
“Wouldn’t that make it weigh even more?”
“But didn’t we have that on board when we originally filled the balloon?”
“Ah.”
“We decompress the gas, so we lose the weight and it goes into the balloon providing buoyancy. We can maneuver it with the large fans at the back. They work independently so we can go full forward, full reverse. But what happens if we have one in full forward and one in full reverse?”
“It blows up?” Isaac ventured. “There needs to be more stuff blowing up.”
“No. That comes later with the cannons.”
“Would you turn?” Sebastian said.
“Yes, very good. And these are the levers.”
Both boys jumped on the levers, pulling and pushing them, fighting their own imagined private war against the evil nemesis.
“All right, enough of that. It’s not a toy. If you break it, you have to pay for it.”
The boys instantly stopped.
“That’ll be enough for today,” Nikola said. “You should be back inside the walls anyway while these dangerous activities are carried out. People don’t like it if you laugh when they get hurt, as they inevitably will when they ignore all the safety instructions.”
He turned to look at the toiling men. “Like this idiot. Simpson! What possessed you to put a ladder on top of another ladder on top of a chair? Anyone with half a brain would at least do it the other way.”
Nikola strode toward Simpson, shaking his health and safety policy at the bald-headed buffoon.
Sebastian called out after him. “Nikola, what’s the device under the hill?”
Nikola stopped in his tracks, mid-policy wave and turned. “What do you know about that?”
“Nothing, other than it was looking at me.”
“It’s still awake? That can’t be. We’ll talk about this later.”
“But—”
“Later. Now go.” He made a shooing movement with his hands.
As the two boys made their way back to the city gates, Sebastian took the opportunity to listen in on a few conversations, hoping that someone would tell an inappropriate joke or swear in an amusing way. One of the snippets he caught worried him. One man said to another that the helium wasn’t buoyant enough to meet the lift specifications. The other responded with the instruction to swap it for hydrogen. He said it was “an executive decision.”
Melanie had crept out and found a small soldiers’ graveyard a short distance from the Zeppelin assembly area. It was quiet and unattended. She knelt and dug out a small hollow in the ground in the center of the plots. The sand trickled through her fingers, its grittiness scratching her skin. She lifted the pendant over her head and placed it in the hole.
“I’m not sure if you can ask the dead for forgiveness, but I need to get over what happened. I can’t continue to let past actions define me. I faced a regret without the time to heal. I have that now.”
She paused and cleared her throat.
“I’ve got someone else. No one will replace you, and I’ll never forgive myself over what happened, but maybe I can make a new promise. And this time get it right.”
She looked around at the men working industriously on the Zeppelins, watching the giant balloons inflating. Isaac was be
ing told off by someone official. The pendant shone brilliantly in the light.
“I need to be a new me.”
She spooned the sand into the hollow and patted it flat.
“Do you feel better?” Nikola said.
Melanie gasped. “How long have you been there?”
“The answer may surprise you. But don’t worry, you live in a city of secrets.”
24
ALBERT EXAMINED THE experiment setup.
“You have been practicing vit the screws?”
“Ja. Er, yes.”
“Okay, ve have the magnet. Could you reverse its polarity?”
Sebastian looked at the two magnets with their opposite poles attracting. He concentrated and the magnet on the left spun one hundred and eighty degrees.
Albert smiled. “Now transfer the magnetic field onto the screw.”
It flew across the bench top and stuck to the side of the magnet on the right. Albert picked up the left magnet and tested it on a small piece of metal. It fell away as a dead piece of metal.
“Now transfer the field from the screw back to the magnet.”
Albert was watching the magnet intently when suddenly his hand started to bleed. He shook his hand while searching for the screw, but it had vanished. Albert stared at the bench top, tapping his fingers. After several moments he got up and searched among the various strange devices stored in the back cupboard.
On his way back to the bench he closed the curtains in the room, making it as dark as he could. As Albert sat, he wiped his hand across the bench, leaving a trail of blood.
“What happened to your hand?” Sebastian said.
“I think you transferred the field, but we need to be certain.”
He placed a long thin object on the bench and flicked a small switch. Slowly, a strong purple glow emanated from the box, casting an eerie glow and making his face look possessed by the physics demon himself.
He held up another screw. “Transfer the magnetic field to this screw.”
Sebastian concentrated.
“Now, slowly, transfer it back. Slowly.”
Sebastian tried to slow the process in his thoughts. He closed his eyes and let the image crawl across the darkness in his imagination.